


First and Last

by homosadpornien



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Accidental Knotting, Angst and Porn, Eventual Happy Ending, First Love, First Time, Flashbacks, Future Fic, Heavy Angst, Knotting, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Memory Magic, Misunderstandings, Regret, Stiles and Derek are REALLY bad at being in love y'all, Timefucked Reverse Slow Build, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2018-01-04 17:36:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homosadpornien/pseuds/homosadpornien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Stiles and Derek have fled Beacon Hills, desperate to forget something that happened on the night of Stiles' graduation from high school. Eight years have passed, and they have separate lives in separate cities. Moving on turns out to be more complicated than moving away, however.</p><p>(Previously titled "Hi" and then "Slipping Through His Fingers." I promise I'm done changing the title.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Other People

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vvvvv](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vvvvv/gifts).



> This is the first fic I've ever written. It's also the first piece of fiction I've written in like five years, so be gentle (if that kind of appeal to sympathy works on you, that is).

The past returns unbidden, like a hungry animal pacing through its home territory.

He could be standing at the front of his class, his students rapt with a story or some other kettle for truth, and the wolf would appear, stalking through the oblivious array of six year-olds piled into knee-high wooden chairs painted in primary colors. Or stumbling down Wallingford, that famous blind avenue, fingers laced through those of a dark-haired boy, and the familiar amber glow, slatted through heavy lids, would appear at the precise level of his diaphragm before disappearing, as if the creature were turning away in embarrassment or pity.

Since he and Derek had left each other, in the aching interceding time, he had wrapped himself in years like a tree. Absconding northward from Beacon Hills—he heard that Derek fled east—he hoped to turn time into a kind of armor or buttress, both a shield and a crutch for the bloody core that made people love him and made that love into a liability.

Pleasure could be a kind of solace, for a time; the mouths and fingers that made his eyelids shudder and forced his heartbeat low and heavy in his chest had been embraces, technically. But it was a circular desire, one whose expiration birthed anew a hungrier animal.

Tonight he shakes the mist from his eyelashes and asks someone named Henry what he wants to do to him. His answer, breathed into the side of his neck, would have made a prior Stiles blush.

“Who the hell is named Henry anymore?” Stiles asks, grinning over his shoulder as he tiptoes between pools of light that hang below the streetlamps, waiting for Henry to bring his wavy black hair and his stubble and his v-neck that struggles to conceal his biceps to him.

“Well, at least it’s not Hank,” Henry replies, teeth glinting, corners of his eyes creased as his tongue darts out to wet his lower lip.

“Hank? Ha!” Stiles exclaims, returning to lean against a parking meter with hands hanging eagerly stretched toward his waist. “You’re not a Hank. Hanks have binders full of baseball cards from when they were young. Hanks coach little league and then get drunk in the den. Hanks smile without meaning it. Well, maybe you’ve got that last thing going on.”

His hips find Stiles’ hands, sliding between them and feeling the gentle press of his grasping hands on the dark denim of his jeans, index fingers slotting through belt loops while the rest curve down into his back pockets. “You think I don’t mean it when I smile?” he asks, his face slanting serious and grave, eyebrows knitting so tightly so as to nearly cross the center line of his perfectly symmetrical face.

At that, Stiles’ face tilts along with the ground beneath his feet. “I could like you, if I wanted to,” he mumbles, and is rewarded with a yawning hungry kiss that seems to aggravate the wolf across the street. Sitting on its haunches, watching as its broad snout snorts in displeasure. It begins to pace. “I just need to decide if I want to.”

“Well,” Henry grins, “how about I audition?” And Stiles is kind of unable to argue with that, leading him up the street with his hand trailing behind.

~-~-~

Derek can feel him out there, somewhere. It’s a low pull, coming from the bottom of his ribcage and radiating westward. It’s a base and snarling thing, this wanting, but it feels like a kind of direction nonetheless. The wanting curls low in his stomach, then, giving up for a time, or perhaps satisfied with the taste of the tongue between his lips.

So he runs, headlong, into the embrace of a new nothing, the boundless west and all of its ghosts panting after the back of his neck.

He had shared his bed with a boy named Kyle and his pale expanse of flesh. The morning light is slanting through the tree outside his window as wind combs through the branches, making the glowing shadows dance across the hardwood floor. Derek’s late for work.

He clamps a piece of toast between his teeth as he unthreads his apartment key from the unadorned ring of metal in his hands. “Feel free to stay as long as you like. Lock up and leave the key under the mat when you go.”

“You’re not afraid I’m gonna steal something?” Kyle asks, looking up from where he’s idly picking at the smear of cum across the peach fuzz on his belly.

Derek stands at the far edge of the bedroom, not crossing the room, but imagining what it would be like. His glance rakes across Kyle’s soft features, his hopeful eyes, his short mussed hair. Someone will love this boy, someone will find a way to owe him that. Someone else. Some other person. Derek glances around the nearly-bare apartment, an eyebrow raised.

“Take whatever you like, just don’t leave anything,” he says, smirking as he crosses toward the door.

~-~-~

Stiles likes Seattle for its alienation, and the pock-marked intimacy of the west coast combined with the generous indifference of a part of the United States that wishes it were Canada. He thinks he could make a life here, if he could make himself unhaunted.

He rolls across Henry’s back to pick up his phone a few seconds before it cries out to warn him of the time. Henry wakes up, yawning, scooping an arm under Stiles’ chest to scrape his roughened cheek against Stiles’ throat. He purrs, and Stiles withdraws.

“Don’t get any funny ideas. I have work in an hour.”

“Oh? Where? I imagine you as some kind of shark lawyer. You fuck like one.”

Stiles grins at that, playing his thumb across the side of Henry’s lips, which are bruised and throbbing. “Nah, actually I teach preschool.”

Henry’s face tilts at its edges, eyebrows lifting as his jaw protrudes in a look that straddles affection and sympathy. “I don’t think I can deal with how cute that is.” He leans forward, brushing his lips against Stiles’, purring into his mouth.

Stiles backs away, giving him a quizzical look as he deflates, slinking back against the sheets. Stiles stands up and pads toward the bathroom, shucking off his socks and tossing them into a wicker hamper as he turns just enough so that Henry can see his eyes rolling as the words slide over his shoulder: “What, do you, like, _love_ me or something?”

~-~-~

Derek slips his phone out of his pocket as he walks toward the el station, sipping his coffee as he spits out a perfunctory non-greeting: “Hale.” Even though he didn’t look at the screen before answering, he can practically hear Isaac’s curls bounding across his head through the line.

“Hey, Derek, how’s it going?” Derek can hear Isaac chewing a fingernail as he waits for his response.

“What do you need?” Derek growls, stopping on a corner and feeling vaguely as if he’s being looked after. Mornings are easier without ambivalent concern from someone who might not recognize him if they met on the street. “It’s been a long time,” he breathes, tossing his cup in a black metal bin.

“Do I need to need something to call you? Can’t I just want to catch up?”

“Historically? No. You usually need something from me. Or worse, want something.”

Isaac sighs and confesses: “It’s pack business. Got a minute?”

Derek closes his eyes and rubs the bridge of his nose. “I don’t have a pack. Not anymore. Haven’t for years.”

On the other end of the country, Isaac’s mouth hangs open for a moment before he tips it shut in recognition that the line has gone dead.

~-~-~

“I’m planning a visit,” Scott is saying as Stiles crowds the phone against his ear, huddled behind his desk as thirty little bodies nap fitfully on the floor of the class. “That is, unless you want to come home…”

“I _am_ home,” Stiles whispers, eyes rolling as Scott huffs in disapproval. “And you know I can’t go back there. Too much…”

“I know,” Scott mutters. “Blood and cum, that old duo.” He chuckles gravely and Stiles swears he can hear a little bit of the boy Scott used to be, before he became an alpha and a father, before he took over Deaton’s practice, before age began to set into him like sediment.

“I was gonna say ‘baggage,’ but I guess the whole heartbreak and trauma thing is a less euphemistic way to say that.” Stiles is staring at the corner of his beige-painted sheet-metal desk, phone pressed hard against his ear to keep Scott’s voice from leaking into these children’s sleepy little world, when he sees the wolf nose its way around the corner.

“So,” Scott breathes, “how are you doing?” He never had been very subtle.

The wolf extends its snout toward Stiles—sniffing, evaluating, recognizing—and rubs the side of its snout against Stiles’ cheek. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he lies, swatting at the creature that isn’t there. “Just work and…”

“You don’t have to lie, Stiles. It’s not like I’m gonna judge you. How are you doing?”

Stiles resents that, the careful display of empathy, the patient recognition of his bullshit. It’s all very dadlike of Scott. “I told you, I’m fine. Just working and—“

“Screwing strangers while the love of your life teaches fucked-up pomo bullshit at Northwestern?”

Stiles sighs as the wolf levels a sympathetic look. “He’s not… can I not get into this right now? I’m having this conversation in a literal roomful of children.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t deflect. Don’t act like we’re… _other people_ to each other.” Scott’s voice takes on a degree of gravity that is also dadlike, albeit in a different way. “Answer the damn question. How. Are. You. Doing?”

Stiles sighs and shifts his eyes across the room as one of his kids rolls over on her foam mat, slinging her body across an enormous orange H, sighing back to sleep. He turns back and leans his forehead against the cool metal of his desk. “Do you remember when things used to be easy?”

Scott chuckles warmly, huffing in sympathy. “Things haven’t been easy in a really long time, dude.”


	2. The Martyr Economy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a reversal of last week's tactics, Stiles tries to keep his distance while Derek strays too close.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come for the Marxist-feminist pun, stay for the werewolf/Catholic laying-of-hands metaphor.
> 
> By way of a content warning, it's worth pointing out that the original character introduced in this chapter is a survivor of sexual violence and that history has a significant bearing on the interaction he has with Derek. Feel free to contact me with any questions about this chapter, and please stay safe while reading. <3
> 
> (Edit: since getting a few questions about what this content warning means, I'll clarify that the original character is a survivor of sexual violence, and the encounter he has with Derek is part of his process of healing and coming to terms with that. The only reference to sexual violence is through vague gestures that, despite their vagueness, are probably more than Adrian is comfortable with. Sorry to unnecessarily concern people with that disclaimer.)

Like all economies, the economy of desire is fragile and contingent. We know our place in it through its failure.

Watching the little blue dot on his phone pulse as it sits throbbing in place in the middle of Seattle, two thousand miles from Chicago, Stiles wonders if time being something you could spend means that it is also something you have to _earn_. He slips the device into his pocket, propping his elbows on the round sticky table as one of Seattle’s famously-doomed athletic franchises squirms under the thumb of the fragile economy of time, the bar’s patrons screaming _don’t let the fuckers run down the clock_.

He sighs and runs his fingers around the rim of his glass, sliding a few bills under the edge of it as he gets up as a Nirvana song starts up. After a few years in Seattle, you start to hate the person who walks up to the rickety jukebox and picks Pearl Jam or Nirvana, no matter how ironic they’re being. The lazy bass line thrums as he adjusts his coat and steps out into the brisk night, the door swinging shut behind him just as Kurt Cobain is singing _I wish I could eat your cancer_.

The sudden change in temperature mixed with the alcohol makes his heart pound uncomfortably in his chest, like a restrained creature dragging its chain. Passing the block with the club where he met Henry, he starts toward his apartment.

~-~-~

Derek can smell apprehension in the room, so heavy and thick it almost drowns out the sex and the smoke and the alcohol. Strobe lights give the effect that the dance floor is blinking back tears, dazed and embarrassed. Derek closes his eyes and isolates the scent of self-loathing and fear, localizes it in the back corner. A sheepish-looking boy, no older than twenty-two, looks up at Derek over the edge of his whiskey and coke.

He’s sipping it and when he sees Derek he snorts a little mouthful into the glass, taken aback by the intensity of Derek’s stare, his eyes seeming almost to glow over the throbbing light. Projectors on either side of the club shoot images from either side of the room, profane parodies of images from illuminated manuscripts yawning across the smoke and the sweat, Serge and Bacchus spreading each other wide while Galerius hides his face.

“Is this seat taken?” Derek asks, arching an eyebrow. The young man shakes his head, taking a sip as he gestures toward the other side of the booth. Derek slides in, the table pressing cold against his ribcage as he leans forward, elbows on the table. Across the table, the young man shifts restlessly, avoiding Derek’s eyes. His hands shake as he sips his drink, amber and cold as his eyes. Derek continues, “I saw you across the… whatever this is, and I was wondering what it is you might want.”

With that, he looks up, a whole world of regret arcing between his features like electricity. Derek stops wondering what he might want, because he knows. He can smell his nervous arousal, the hesitant optimism, the part of him below the table that is just on the verge of leaking. He can hear him salivating, can practically see his cheeks throbbing and then he actually can as his tongue explores the smooth district of desire glancing through the inside of his mouth.

Derek waits a few moments for a response. “Let’s start with an easy one,” he pushes past the silence, grinning. “What’s your name?”

“Adrian,” he mutters, looking up at him through his eyelashes and spinning his drink. “My name’s Adrian. And you?”

“Derek.” He sits, marinating in the awkward silence for a moment, then tilts his head. “It’s loud here, isn’t it?”

Adrian spits out a sonorous laugh, then clasps his hand over his mouth and nods furiously for a moment. “Yes, it is. It really is.” He tips back the last of his drink and smiles expectantly.

“My place is quiet,” Derek offers, the corners of his mouth seeming to shrug in an aloof little grin. “I mean, sometimes it is.”

~-~-~

Stiles is in the dark again. It’s in the dark that he can see that the present is herniated, the past always rutting up against it, wanting to penetrate it, wanting to implicate itself back between the pages. He remembers sitting and watching his mother spinning wool, he fingers deftly playing across the fiber, the lump of unspun roving pure potential and her barely-suppressed disappointment with the final result the cost of the future. In the present, though, all that exists, all that could ever exist, is the touch of surface upon surface.

He tosses a pillow over top of his head and rolls over onto his face, spreading his legs and feeling the cool sheets against his thighs. He imagines short insistent fingers against his neck and between his thighs, and as he begins to harden he swears he can feel fragrant breath on the back of his neck. The embrace of a ghost is better than nothing, he thinks, as he loses himself in it, the wolf watching from the foot of the bed, hips rushing forth as he futilely tries to bite back tears.

~-~-~

Adrian enters Derek’s apartment with what could be either hesitance or penitence, depending on if his thoughts rush forward or backward. Derek hopes forward, but that is always the direction of hope.

“I was thinking,” Derek says, popping the cap off of two beers with barely-concealed claws, “that tonight could be about what you want. I mean, more so than me.” He sets Adrian’s beer on the granite countertop and takes a swig of his own. “That is, if that’s what you want. If you want to want, tonight.” He cringes and sets his beer down. “You know what I mean.”

Adrian halves the bottle in one gesture without breaking eye contact. Panting for a moment, abandoning the second half of the beer, he nods, blushing: “I think I’d like to want that.” Giggling his small foolish laugh, his hand in front of his mouth and then Derek is pulling it away and replacing that cover (that _defense_ ) with his lips.

“Then tell me,” Derek smiles against Adrian’s mouth, stubble scritching in the near-darkness. “What do you want?”

Adrian considers him for a moment, eyes blazing with desire as he whispers, “I wanna say yes and I want it to mean something.”

A green chill settles in Derek’s stomach at the revelation. He mumbles numbly, “as opposed to saying no and it not—?”

But Adrian’s lips are on him, silencing him, choking out his doubt and his regret, his inexperienced tongue yawning into the slit, his wet partition of a mouth that is now drawing Derek’s face from a look of horror into one of pleasure. “Most of all, I want it not to hurt this time.” Adrian pulls away and levels a questioning stare at Derek, who nods solemnly. The young man looks around briefly, then: “And I’d like the lights on, if you’d be alright with that. I’d like to see you. Would you be alright with that?”

Derek nods and strides toward his bedroom, flicking on the light switch, drowning the room in a milty glow from two lamps on either side of the bed. Adrian remains in the hallway, surveying the scenery, and clucks his tongue. “You have such high ceilings. Like… a cathedral. Leave it to me, lapsed lapsed Catholic, losing it in church.”

“So it _is_ your first—“

“—time saying _yes_ ,” Adrian finishes for him, settling the matter by killing his beer and setting it back on the counter. “How about you?”

“Non-virgin, non-Catholic. I didn’t grow up believing in anything and then I learned what people mean when they reserve the word ‘hell’ for the worst of all things—you know, the inescapable things?—and then I believed in heaven, for a while.” Derek closes the distance between him and Adrian, stepping out of the modest glow of the threshold. “I’m back to not believing in anything these days.” And then he’s leaning down, lips parting, heaving the young man into his arms.

~-~-~

Like anyone who has had to train himself to fuck without first taking care, Stiles knows that at the heart of all exertion throbs a singular loss. With each muscle contracting, each sinew strung tight like a bow, there is a depletion. Rutting against his bed and frenzied with desire, dehydrating from the tears, fingers searching his body’s territory for some hidden vein of joy but finding only terror, before slipping between his legs with a cry.

Two thousand miles away, Derek is entering Adrian, sucking the gasp out of his mouth as he wraps a hand around the back of his waist. Tilting the young man’s hips up toward his as black lines twist up his arm, Derek mouths curses into that strange damp collarbone, nipping at the piqued flesh without marking it. These were the terms of their exchange—Derek’s pleasure for Adrian’s pain, Derek’s cock for his terror. Adrian’s hands running pale rivulets up Derek’s back as he urges him deeper into the cleft of his hips, unaware of the stinging fullness that each thrust deposits in Derek’s guts.

Derek pushes off of Adrian’s shoulders, his lips wetly disembarking from his clavicle as he imagines himself filled with a narrower column than his, pleasure searing through the pain as he feels stubby fingers lengthen across the breadth of his chest the way his own stay locked in their form across Adrian’s. He feels himself, fucking himself, pain given way to ecstasy as his own body is displaced by fantasy. Short hair bristling against the back of his neck, a smooth cheek playing across his shoulder blades, a voice so many miles and years away that the echo shakes his bones. “I need you,” he and the echo are saying, in unison, bodies mirrored and tangled, as Adrian’s eyes glass over with wanting, his orgasm creeping ever closer.

Stiles has finished, clumsily getting himself off before sliding three fingers out of himself with a faint slick _pop_. He feels himself wither as he shucks off his defenses. He lays to the side of his pillow, staring at the ceiling, for a moment, then brings his fist down— _hard_ —into the soft fabric beside him, gripping the pillowcase and hurling it across the room, toward his grey shadow. It hits the wolf across the breadth of its body, and the beast crumples chest-first like ash flicked out of its form, collapsing in on itself, until it is merely a shadow of a shadow with two glowing embers peeking out from the center.

Derek can feel himself clenching as Adrian gets closer and closer, can feel the dilating throb as he brings himself closer to an orgasm that will be best described as perfunctory. He wraps himself in the dread of dead pleasure, feeling his arm beginning to numb from the exertion behind Adrian’s back. The ache is climbing toward his heart.

Stiles gasps as the creature goes down, crumpling out of sight, then swings his legs out of bed and creeps toward the site of the lost haunting. His left hand rests tenderly against his collarbone as his right hand reaches ever closer to the pile of ash without touching. Never touching.

Adrian is staring up at Derek, lost in the perfection of this moment, mouth forming a slackened O as he mumbles, “why doesn’t it hurt?” as tears stream down his face. Derek realizes he has taken more than just pain from this boy. He cums, words lost in a hazy swirl of oaths and aggregations as Adrian goes rigid beneath him and the phantom voice in his ear softens to nothing like a dying nerve. Derek excuses himself and turns on the shower the next room over, one hand covering his mouth as the other traverses the space between his heart and his clavicle, the metronome under his palm keeping time with the jagged sobs that unspool from him as the ache drains from his chest.

Derek stands in the doorway, eyeing the condom that lays abandoned on the hardwood floor, and looks over at where Adrian is burying his face in a pillow.

He tilts his head up from where it’s laying and says, “I’ve wanted you for so long.” Derek tenses up at his phrasing, lifting an eyebrow quizzically. “And it’s Robert Coover’s fault.”

With that, Derek is swept back into the past, three autumns prior, to a memory that took place behind his eyes, which were situated behind a lectern in a lecture hall that had been designed to resemble an amphitheater. He had been discussing Coover’s story about the wolf at the door, his revision of an old myth, when the timbre of his voice loosened around the words “cowardly lonely love” and his gaze was drawn to the center aisle of the sixth row, where the face that he now recognizes in the memory as the face smiling grimly from his bed had been stitched up in sympathy. Adrian’s hair was different then, but the distrustful optimism settling across his brow is unmistakable.

“That lecture,” he continued, “was the first day back after the weekend when… _it_ … happened. I felt like nothing.” Adrian is sitting up, resting his head against his knees. “I don’t think I should say anything more.”

“You should have told me you were my student,” Derek is saying, not really experiencing himself saying it, but feeling the presence of the words in the room nonetheless. “What if I had had an objection?”

Adrian flinches, then curls his mouth into a knowing smile. “Well, who better to do”—he gestures imperiously toward the almost-bare bedroom—“ _this_ with than the man who introduced me to experimental fiction?” He snorts out a barely-audible laugh and Derek doubles over on his way toward the bed, capturing Adrian’s face in his hands, kissing that nearly-featureless curl of lip, laughing so hard he cries.

~-~-~

Derek is standing in a field, snow up to his waist, and Stiles’ back is turned, so far away it’s not worth estimating. He cries out, his lips caressing the shape of his name as it leaves his body, and Stiles turns. Slowly, so slowly, his head tilting across his shoulder, then his body following, and he is running, and so is Derek, the distance between them depleting like a sigh. The snow is deepening and thickening, and it is only when it reaches their chins that they realize it is not snow but ash. Swimming through the acrid-smelling sea of nothing-that-once-was-something, their fingertips brush against one another’s just as their faces dip under the surface that rolls and shifts above them. With that brushing of flesh on flesh, the whole field bursts into flame, orange licking toward a blank sky as Stiles pulls Derek close and begs to be _consumed_.

At the same time, two thousand miles apart, Derek and Stiles awaken from the same dream. Stiles is curled around his comfortable grey shadow, which licks the salt from his cheeks. Derek lays alone in bed next to a scrawled note that simply reads _take care_.


	3. This Moon and These Stars and Us Watching Them

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the first flashback, we get a glimpse of what Derek and Stiles used to have, so many years ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to try to post twice a week, and since I'm on winter break right now, I figured I'd get ahead of the game. Also, I've been thinking of making a tumblr for this fic, but I don't know how tumblr works, so let me know if you think it'd be a good idea or not. I'm not actually sure what the pros and cons would be.
> 
> (Edit: I'm also trying to get better about not posting in the middle of the fucking night, haha. Insomnia sucks.)

In the winter, everything slept. Under the trees of The Preserve, which swung heavily with ice, casting a veil of light as the moon’s glow dissipated through the cocoon of those silent branches, they sat. Derek nuzzled the back of Stiles’ ear, mouthing silence into the smooth planes of his shivering body as their breath puffed out, hanging in the air like blank speech bubbles that could contain nothing. Silent spaces in which nothing could persist.

“You can’t be part of this anymore,” Derek said finally, and Stiles turned to face him, bewilderment shadowing the pale angles of his face. “It’s too dangerous.” His hand brushed up underneath Stiles’ flannel, exploring the topography beneath. “You’re human. You scar.”

“Bad excuse,” Stiles muttered, “everybody scars. You should know that. You, especially. You scar but your skin refuses to because your skin isn’t all that there is to you.” Casting a glance at the full moon hanging pregnant with dread above them, he continued: “You, especially, should know that too.”

“I can’t see you get hurt again.”

“Can’t see me get hurt again? Then keep your distance, because that’s part of the”—he gestured broadly, shoulders swinging across the minuscule space between them—“ _deal_.”

Derek captured his chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting his head back into a kiss, slow and lazy. “Well, the deal sucks,” he said into the firm line of his mouth.

They sat there in silence for a moment, clouds of breath mingling under the dome of night.

Stiles broke the silence first: “I wanted to tell you, we read this poem in AP Lit today. It was by this guy, Fernando Pessoa, some Spanish guy? It goes something like, I don’t know, ‘if the heart could think, it’d stop beating.’ There was something comforting about it. I don’t know, I’m just talking. Ignore me.” He gave a testing look over his shoulder, where Derek had stopped nibbling his ear and was staring, eyes crackling with pity.

Derek grunted, rubbing his chin against the back of Stiles’ neck, remembering their post-fight ritual, picking the viscera of whatever creature out of each other’s hair. “You don’t get to do that, you know.” He planted small kisses in the root of Stiles’ shoulders. “You don’t get to get _okay_ with dying, like it’s just another thing.”

Stiles leveled him with a stare that bore no patience. Smiling and leaning forward, he brushed Derek’s lips with his own. “I don’t think that’s what he meant,” he said against Derek’s cheek, hands searching the plane of his back as they curled together on the crisp earth under the shadow of those trees. “I think it seems… I don’t know. Grateful?”

“Grateful?”

“Yeah, grateful,” Stiles said, gesturing between the two of them, shrugging, his arms and eyes struggling to articulate the idea, the words refusing to heel at his command. Stiles huffed and curled back up against Derek’s chest, feeling his warmth teasing through him as he laid a finger on the words: “Grateful that there’s more than one way to know somebody, I think, is what I mean? That it’s not just…” He sighed heavily, then continued: “We don’t have to be just one thing to each other.”

“Is this you telling me you’re not a kid anymore?” Stiles didn’t need to look up to know that Derek was smiling, he could hear it in the playful way the older man’s voice tilted as his fingers played against the small of his back.

Stiles groaned. “Well, I’m not. I’m not a kid anymore, Derek. I’m not the same gangly kid you met three years ago. I’m a senior, I’ll be on my own soon, anyway.” He turned and lifted his long fingers to stroke Derek’s cheek. “And, besides, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m, like, _way_ more powerful than you are.”

Stiles disengaged from their embrace and, Derek’s attention broken for the first time, no longer straining to catch a glimpse of the side of his wan face, he noticed the snow. Where it had been piled in brief furrows, it was now shifting, tiny shining flakes catching the light as they constellated, hovering above the coldest layer of air, but still so near to the earth. They continued to tumble toward the stars, flurrying back where they came, dodging the icicles dangling from the crackling trees as they made their ascent.

Sitting across from Stiles, their knees pressed together, Derek leaned forward and Stiles could hear the low rumbling in his chest. “You don’t have to master nature to be powerful, Stiles. More than one thing to each other?” He laughed, Stiles’ face turning up in the moment just before he recognized the affection thrumming underneath. “You’re not just the gangly kid I met three years ago, or the… whatever-you-are who saved my ass from that naga tonight. You’re…” Derek sighed, the words evasive, closing his eyes and finally blurting out, “There doesn’t have to be danger for you to save me. You save me every night. You’re always saving me.” Cautiously opening his eyes, breath dissipating between him and Stiles, his vision returned and he saw the hollows under Stiles’ eyes as his mouth formed the O of recognition before tilting subtly into a shy smile.

Stiles shoved Derek playfully, grinning broadly, throwing his body at him as he straddled his waist, neck arching down as he kissed him. “Dude,” he breathed out, condensation moistening the skin of Derek’s cheek, “you, like, _totally_ love me.”

Derek laughed, one of those rare occurrences that shook Stiles’ concentration so much that the lifting blanket of snow shuddered a bit before continuing its skyward retreat. “I guess I do.”

“You guess?” Stiles affected an exaggerated pout as he sat up, pulling his face away from Derek’s searching lips. Stiles lifted an eyebrow in a parody of Derek’s favorite gesture of suspicion.

Derek huffed, knowing that wouldn’t be good enough. “You’re not just some gangly kid, or some scarily powerful whatever, or…” He cast a fatigued glance across the silent distance between the grove where they sat and the hill where his family’s home used to sit. He started over. “You can’t die because it would kill me. I wouldn’t be able to be anything without you. So, no, we don’t need the danger to save each other, but I’m gonna do my fucking best to protect you, to pull you out of the monster’s jaws, because you’re not just some gangly kid.” Steeling himself to keep his voice from cracking over the next few words, he continued: “You’re also my very last scrap of heart.” Derek looked shyly up at Stiles, whose breath hung heavily between them as tears froze on his cheeks. “And I owe you that.”

And then Stiles was kissing him, smoothing his body against him and laying his hands underneath Derek’s shirt, feeling the rumbling growl that emanated from his chest as they embraced. The dampness of Stiles’ cheeks transferring frost to Derek’s face, their searching hands, their humming mouths. The snow flung up from the earth as their breath hung crystalized in the air in front of their mouths. As if it, too, wanted to retreat, to find the place where it belonged.

So they persisted in the pleasure of that silence, persisting even across the years and miles that separate this memory from the moment in which it is seized. Seized as if by the gaze of a passerby fogging a storefront window with breath that betrays a prowling desire. A desire that wanted to nose its way back inside their bodies like the silent retreat of their breath and curl up inside the comfort and the warmth that strayed just this side of burning.


	4. Presents

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's late, and Derek calls Stiles, and it goes about as well as you'd expect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the enormous delay in getting this next chapter up. I'm going to try to get back into writing regularly, but my work schedule has been absolute murder lately.

“Hey, shut up, let my quiet get used to your quiet for a second.”

Stiles rolls his eyes. “Yeah, sure, because this is how real conversations go.”

“I don’t need authenticity, I just need a minute, just a little bit of silence.” Derek’s gritting his teeth. It comes through in his tone, all laced through with the strain of his jaw.

Stiles pulls back the covers, grateful for the opportunity to just not say anything, to let his cheeks hollow and his heart roll like a stone. Derek is breathing, softly, and maybe whispering something, but it’s hardly there, the words a shaking thing on the sheer, glimmering edge of vanishing.

Derek takes a deep breath, closing his eyes tightly as he lays his head against the Camaro’s steering wheel, one hand clutching the phone to his head, its bevel marking his cheek as his other hand lays tracks in the dust on the dash. He opens the glove box, pulling out a deck of cards.“How have you been?”

“Unconvincing. Ask me again, but this time without meaning ‘I love you.’”

Derek inhales and reaches across his throat to hold his phone with the other hand, slipping open the pack with the pad of his thumb. “You know I can’t. Can’t say anything to you without…” He exhales and tries to hold the moment still, even as it flees and burrows. The wolf in his chest jumps with excitement as he draws the first card: ace of clubs. “It’s too true.” Stiles chuckles and he continues, “Unfortunately.” Jack of diamonds.

“Well, try to keep it on your side of our problems, okay?” Stiles says, pulling the sheet up to cover Henry’s sleeping body, watching as it clings to the sweat curving down the small of his back.

“Your breathing is calmer than last year. I hope you’re doing okay.” Stiles sits next to Henry’s head, feeling him stir. “And there’s someone else there. Someone sleeping. Are you with Henry?”

“Turn off the dog ears, Derek.”

“If you’re busy I can let you go.”

Stiles laughs. “Come on, Derek, I think we both know you can’t let me go,” he says, brushing Henry’s hair out of his eyes, the memory burning low in his stomach.

~-~-~

Derek grabbed the commencement cap from Stiles’ head, ducking behind a tree, the music warbling as he sped through the preserve with the lanky boy following close behind.

“No fair! Give it!” Stiles exclaimed as he tripped over his feet, grasping Derek’s jacket, tumbling after him, spilling beer all over himself. He tumbled to the ground, laughing, as Derek tried to pull him to his feet and lost his footing, falling over him. Stiles pulled him into a slow and sleepy kiss.

He had graduated from high school less than twelve hours prior and was now rolling around on the forest floor with his gorgeous boyfriend, and was currently wondering how this became his life.

“Derek,” Stiles panted, breaking their kiss. “I think I’m ready.”

~-~-~

“It’s really not fair, what you’re doing to him, you know.”

“Sorry, Derek, but I only take romantic advice from literally anyone who’s not you.” The line between them takes hold of a grimace. “Besides, it’s better this way.”

“Better? Better in the sense that you get to withhold and manipulate?” Derek rolls his forehead against the steering wheel, pulling another card. Ten of spades. He tosses it on the pile in the passenger seat. “I swear, Stiles, you must cum secrets,” he says, chuckling.

Stiles snorts, tucking a loose strand of hair behind Henry’s ear. “No.” He shifts his phone to the other side, standing up and pacing across the bedroom. “Better because it’s uncomplicated. We’re just on when we’re on and otherwise, we’re just nothing. It’s part-time. You know, sometimes I’m tempted to wave to him, if I see him on the bus or something?” Stiles laughs.

“But that doesn’t really work, does it?”

“No. It doesn’t.” Stiles sighs and flicks on the bathroom light, leaning against the pedestal-style sink.

“That’s the part that’s not fair. You could actually have something with him, but you choose not to.”

Stiles lips hook up into a small smile. “Please, Derek, please, tell me I’m throwing it all away. I would love to hear you say that. It would absolutely make my night.”

“Is it about the power? About proving you can do it?” Derek scrubs a hand across his face, tossing the three of hearts onto the pile. “I mean, it’s not like it’s a small thing, making someone forget, if you’re trying to impress—”

Stiles laughs, boisterous and cold. “Impress who? Impress _you_? Listen, Derek, you’re not my alpha or my boyfriend, I have no use for your approval anymore.” Stiles kicks the bathroom door closed as Henry stirs. “Because now? Now you’re nothing to me. Now you’re just somebody I fucked before I knew better.”

~-~-~

They tumbled in the door, stripping off their soaked clothes, pouring kisses like wine, whispering need like need. Stiles kicked off his sneakers, tangling them in his jeans, hands exploring underneath Derek’s shirt, the wet fabric heavy on his wrists.

Derek pulled him into a deep, lingering kiss, teeth darting across his lips. “You’re excited. I can hear it.”

Stiles pulled away in a theatrical pout. “No fair,” he groaned, “wolf-ears.” He pulled Derek’s shirt over his head and pressed his ear to his chest, inhaling the smell of the beer and the woods and his arousal as Derek’s pulse thumped against his temple. He looked up at him, amber eyes shattering the dim light of the foyer. “You’re excited too.”

Derek peeked out from an armhole, grinning. “I am. I was kind of, uh, flipping out during the whole walk over.” He blushed, struggling to free himself from the henley.

When he finally untangled the fabric from around his head, Stiles was standing there, naked, smirking. “Derek?” he asked, stepping closer. “Fuck me like you own me?”

~-~-~

“You asked if I was ever going to let him remember?”

“Yeah?” Derek’s head perks up off the steering wheel, interested. He flicks another card out of the pack. Nine of clubs.

“I might, one day, let him keep the memory. But you only ever get one night. You have one chance, and that’s it.” Ace of diamonds. Stiles settles against the door.

“So you’ll let him remember when it’s perfect?” Ten of spades.

“No, I’ll let him remember when I deserve it.” Ace of hearts.

~-~-~

Stiles was shaking, his whole body somehow tense and limp at once, as Derek pulled out and tied off the condom, curling up next to him. Stroking his hair and smiling dully into his jawline as the storm raged outside. Despite the closeness, he felt as if he were left to wander alone in this new district of his body, the lanes narrow and the morning light cold.

“Oh my god,” Stiles said, his fingers playing over his collarbone as tears welled up in his eyes, “oh my _god_.”

Derek’s chest hitched into place next to his, their breathing playing back and forth, a kind of slow hissing volley. Drops of rain were constellating voyeurs on the windowpane: colliding, merging, breaking into pieces. “You okay, dude?” Derek propped himself up on one elbow, tracing Stiles’ lips with trembling fingers as he gazed into his glassy eyes.

“More than okay. _Better_ than okay.” Stiles snapped out of it, turning toward Derek and smiling softly, his whole face curling. “Is that…” His tone turned conspiratorial. “Is that how it always is? I mean, is it always that good? Because, I mean, I had to wait eighteen years for it, and if it’s just something people do and nobody told me it was that g—“

Stiles’ eyes went wide as he felt Derek’s face pressing against his as a firm sheaf of tongue slid into his interrupted words. He wrapped his arm around Derek’s shoulders, his other hand slipping between their sticky torsos. “Thank you, Derek,” Stiles said, laying his head on Derek’s collarbone.

“Thank me?” Derek kissed the top of Stiles’ head. “For what?”

Stiles pulled away, and they both ignored the tackiness between their stomachs. He looked into Derek’s eyes, then looked away, blushing, before turning back and smiling. “For not letting it be anybody else but you.”

~-~-~

“You know, if you say the word, I can be there in a day and a half. I’ll speed. Say the word and the last eight years vanish. Say the word and you can let Henry go and—”

“Why would I want to let Henry go?” Stiles runs his toe along the grout on the outside of the shower. “What we have is perfect. No pain, no regret. No past at all. All we have is a bright future.” He shrugs. “I mean, it’s not happiness, but it’s close enough. It’s like diet happiness. If you think about something else hard enough that you only half-taste it, you can convince yourself.”

Derek flicks another card out of the pack. Seven of diamonds. “That’s the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

“You know what the saddest thing I’ve ever heard is?” Stiles asks, scoffing. “You, saying ‘I love you’ back then, and not meaning it and meaning ‘I love you’ when you say literally anything to me today. It’s pathetic. It’s dreary. Your voice is like rain to me. I only put up with it because I’m used to it by now.”

“Do you ever wonder, if things had been different, if… we might’ve been happy?” Derek closes his eyes tightly, a tear rolling down his face as he loses steam halfway through the last word, barely whispering it, just a ghost. Even with so little breath behind it, the word throbs like a prayer.

Stiles’ face screws up in momentary concentration, and he breathes deeply. “Not really. I mean,” Stiles rolls his palm across the back of his neck. “I don’t think it does anybody any good to wonder.”

“How different do you think things would have to be?”

“For us to be happy? I think we’d have to be different people.” They both laugh, then, Derek’s raucous and ricocheting through the parking garage, Stiles’ a low humming chuckle that becomes a sob as he covers his mouth with a shaking palm.

~-~-~

Stiles looked up at Derek through his eyelashes as he dressed. “Where you goin’?” he asked sleepily, stretching as Derek padded across the bedroom to retrieve his socks.

The morning was breaking, sunlight aching over the horizon as the storm clouds from the night before dissipated.

“Just gonna grab something.” Derek said, grinning, as he kissed Stiles on the forehead. “Back in a minute. It’s your going-away present.”

Derek disappeared into the hallway and Stiles froze. When Derek returned, Stiles was dressing, rage radiating off of him in waves. As he approached with two coffees and a folder tucked under his arm, Stiles held out a finger. “Don’t you fucking start.”

Derek stared and impotently held out a coffee, his expression buckling. “Take it.”

“A fucking _going-away present_ , Derek? _Really_?” Stiles glanced from Derek’s face back toward the mug in his outstretched hand. He shook his head briefly, then swatted at the mug petulantly. They both watched as it shattered.

Stiles leaned down and began to pick up the pieces, beige little wolf-tooth chunks of ceramic. Derek squatted next to him, leaning over. “It’s not like that, Stiles, I didn’t mean that.” He held out a supplicant’s palm, eyes full of hope.

“You really think, after all this,” Stiles gestured between them, stray droplets of coffee peppering Derek’s pants, “I was still going to Northwestern?” Stiles’ voice quietened, sweetened. “You really think I’m that stupid?”

Stiles turned and slid past Derek, depositing the shards in the bathroom down the hall before going to snatch his backpack from the foyer.

“No, Stiles, it’s not y—”

“It’s not me, it’s you? I’m not just some dumb kid you fucked because he didn’t know better? Or is it that I’m not some pity fuck? ‘Happy graduation, Stiles, I know you’ve wanted me for—’” His voice hitched terribly, he brought a hand to his chest to try to rein it in. “‘Forever, but I’ll just grin and bear it’?” Stiles’ face was burning, furious at the betrayal and embarrassed from the pleasure. He yanked on his tennis shoes, considering leaving the registration packet for Beacon Hills Community College on the floor but thinking better of it.

Derek stared, frozen. He had never seen Stiles like this, could never imagine that he could contain such venom. He pulled his face into a forced smile. “Stiles, stay, let me explain, you’ll think it’s funny once I tell y—”

“Face it, Derek, you burned down your own fucking house this time.”

And Derek knew then, like he’d always known, that their love was perfect in its vanishing: not the desert but the mirage, not the diamond but its glimmer. A rare shining thing, sublime in its rarity; the rarity of the thing that does not— _can_ not—exist.

His acceptance letter to Northwestern slid to the ground as he dropped the second mug. _  
_

~-~-~

“You were like a fever, I was sick with you. I wanted you— _needed_ you—so much.” His breath is low and serrated.

“You didn’t want me enough.” Stiles’ voice rises in the middle, spitting out the word “want” like a curse.

“I wanted you enough. I loved you en—”

“You didn’t love me enough, you didn’t even want me enough to want me more than you wanted to be the one who got left. You didn’t even want me more than you wanted to be a martyr. I was just the latest object in the long tragic story of Derek Hale—orphaned, fucked, tortured, abandoned.”

Derek’s voice is quiet. “I wanted to know you. You were always so unpredictable, so unknowable, so loud and so rare. I wanted to know you.” He pulls another card, the last couple rattling in the cardboard sleeve. Six of clubs.

Stiles sighs through his nose, scrubbing a hand across his face, gaze fixed on Henry. “Yeah, well...”

Derek’s down to the last card, one last pull of the pack. “I could love you this time, I promise. I could love you so good, I swear it. I could love you perfectly. You don’t have to love me back, I’ll love you enough for us both,” Derek wails, his face turned-up as he chokes out the words, promises pouring out of him like sand from a broken hourglass. He flips over the card. It’s the low joker. He laughs, even as he’s sobbing. “I learned so much since last time.”

“Yeah? What’d you learn? I’ll tell you what I learned,” Stiles says, his fingers drifting across Henry’s forehead, the memory of the evening’s events coming to the surface and slipping through the membrane of their touch, just as it had so many times before. Sometimes from a chaste kiss in his own doorway as he herded the poor stupid boy back out into the city. “I learned that, sometimes, the best way to love someone is to spare them.”

The line is silent for a moment. Stiles stands up, collects his things. He makes sure he hasn’t forgotten anything, just like always. He shrugs into his jacket and tilts his toes into his shoes. He inches the front door closed and locks it, replacing the key under the “Peanuts” welcome mat.

“Stiles?” Derek’s voice is quiet and small, it’s barely anything. “Call me sourwolf?” he pleads, knowing it’s insipid, knowing it won’t fix anything, knowing it’s the least either of them could do.

Stiles exhales heavily, closing his eyes just outside the door. “Goodnight, sourwolf,” he breathes out, starting down the hallway. “Happy birthday. ’Til next year.”


	5. Hunger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles and Derek both encounter familiar faces.

How inhospitable a universe, in which something like this could happen.

The creature snuffs, staggers across the bedroom, buries its face in the duvet. A whine escapes.

Stiles stirs from sleep, the gasp of morning trembling across his downturned face. The wolf eyes him hopefully but with disdain, and they both know that he is the source of its exhaustion. It climbs sleepily onto the bed, its body unfurling like a scroll as it crumbles upward, skeletal limbs crossed petulantly.

This happens more and more often, Stiles thinks, as he closes his eyes and feels the creature’s glare in his chest. The ceiling emerges from behind the translucent pink curtains of his eyelids as the creature’s voice curls across the blankets, its eyes a throbbing glacial blue. He sits up, the monster’s gaze catching his, like he’s prey. As if he can be the thing its wanting wants.

“Derek,” he mumbles, the glow of the wolf’s eyes mirrored in the quaking watery surface of his own, “I know I’m years late, and you’re nowhere, but I didn’t mean to… to _take_ from you…” The wolf unseats itself, untangling its limbs, its tail curling like a smile, its head cocking. Stiles cups his hand under the animal’s jaw, curling his fingers toward its ear. It closes its eyes and leans into the touch. “If I could give him back, I would.”

The wolf looks small, now, smaller even than before. This thing—this avatar of their love, this evidence; the tax levied by Stiles’ regime of indifference—is shrinking, slumping toward a future that will ache with its absence.

Stiles closes his eyes, tears rolling down his cheeks as the creature leans its head against his chest and whines dully. “I’m sorry, boy,” he says as he lays a hand on its matted trembling flank. “I’d feed you if you were real.”

~-~-~

Derek stalks down the hallway toward his office, a paper cup of coffee in each hand, the cardboard sleeves containing their heat slipping against his palm. Setting one cup on top of the other, he fishes his keys out of his pocket and leans his forehead against the cheap laminate of the door. He smells smoke. He takes a moment to shake the memory from his body and opens the door.

“Hi, Lydia,” he says flatly, even before it’s fully open, as the door clears the way for the view of the red soles of Lydia’s Louboutins, then her long pale legs, and then the eggplant-colored dress she’s wearing.

She smiles grimly and uncrosses her legs, setting them on the floor with a click that punctuates the door shutting behind Derek. “Happy birthday, sweetie,” she intones, gesturing toward the coffee and flicking ash from her cigarette onto the linoleum floor. Derek remembers, then, when he and Stiles had talked about their first inklings that Lydia might be something supernatural and Stiles had said, _well yeah, I thought maybe, but then I remembered that glamazons don't count as supernatural creatures_. Derek smiles.

“You’re a week and a half late,” Derek grunts, setting both coffees down on the desk— _his_ desk—and letting his face fall into a familiar scowl as Lydia wraps him in a hug.

“You’ll forgive me.” She looks up at him, her ginger eyelashes catching the morning light slanting in through the mailslot-sized window. “Besides, you know what you’re like the day of your birthday.” She picks up her coffee and sips it, glancing knowingly at Derek. “And you know _why_ …”

Derek sighs and scrubs his hand across the back of his neck sheepishly. His face drops. “Can we actually not this time? I was having a good morning.”

Lydia holds up two perfectly-manicured hands, a look of faux-surprise crossing her face and completing the gesture. “Hey, I just thought, maybe if _I_ were engaging in truly twisted self-destructive behavior, I’d want someone to intervene,  but if not, _fine_ , feel free to go down with the ship.” She smiles grimly around the beige lip of the cup, eyeing him with pity. “Derek, sweetie, you can’t—”

“I know what I can’t do,” Derek snaps, sitting in the wood-and-pleather chair that’s normally reserved for students. “My limits have always been obvious. It’s my… _capabilities_ that have been more mysterious.” He takes a sip of coffee and cocks an eyebrow. “You should sympathize with that.”

“Now, now, Derek,” Lydia coos, “no need to be a bitch.” She stands up, slipping on her emerald green coat. “Come on. I’m taking you out to lunch.”

Derek gestures toward the door and whines, “But my students—”

“Fuck your students. Lunch.” Lydia flashes a dazzling smile. “With me.”

~-~-~

Stiles calls in sick and curls up with the wolf, stroking its flank as it prepares for nothingness. His phone buzzes. “Hi Scott,” he mutters, half cut-off by the labored breathing in the room with him.

“Hey,” Scott’s voice answers. “Kids down for a nap?”

“No. I mean, maybe. But I took the day off. There’s a whole… _thing_ going on.” Stiles tangles his fingers in coarse fur, whispering so as not to disturb it.

“Related to what happened last week?” Scott offers.

“Probably,” Stiles shrugs, “I mean, what _isn’t_?”

There’s a long pause and then Scott overcomes the silence. “Are you still seeing things?”

“As always,” Stiles answers, curling one leg under himself and pressing his hand against the shivering flank. And feeling them, he doesn’t say.

“Ghosts?” Scott asks. “Or worse?”

Stiles’ laugh scratches out noncommittally. “Worse. Definitely worse.”

~-~-~

Lydia sits across from Derek and summons the waiter with two fingers flicking toward their table. “We’ll drink wine and have something to eat. Then, you’ll pour your heart out to me and I’ll withhold judgment. And then we’ll never talk about this again.” Lydia gestures toward the wine list, shooing the server away. “How’s that sound?”

“Miserable,” Derek mutters, slumping in his seat and crossing him arms petulantly.

“Too fucking bad,” Lydia growls. It’s cheerful, somehow. She glances around the dining room, taking in the mahogany tables and scarlet wallpaper with little gold fleurs-de-lis all over. It’s incredibly garish but somehow sweet, like when they watch their students trying much too hard. “Or how about this?” Lydia extracts her phone from the pocket of her coat, flicking it back and forth with a coordinated pair of tilts of her thumb and forefinger. She grins. “He always answers my calls. Not just once a year.”

“The first thing it is.” Derek rolls his eyes as the waiter sets down two glasses of red wine and pulls a tobacco pouch from his jacket, crumbling a bit of dried wolfsbane into his glass. The dregs float on top of the liquid, sinking into the viscous fluid as they draw the wine into their hollow little bodies.

~-~-~

Stiles pulls the steak from the microwave, fingers dancing across the heat of the rim of the plate as he walks from the kitchen to his bedroom, floorboards creaking beneath his socked feet. He lays it next to the wolf’s head. It doesn’t stir.

He curls up next to it, knees against its chest, its face buried in his lap.

Suddenly he is in a deep dark place, and the wolf is next to him, full in its skin. Its eyes glow brightly.

“There is no giving it back,” he hears Derek’s voice say. Behind him. He doesn’t turn around.

“I wish I could do it all over,” Stiles mutters, the wolf nosing at his hand.

Derek’s voice laughs grimly. “So you could give it what it wants?” The dark crowds the edges of his perception. “You fight fire with fire. You feed love with love.”

“No,” Stiles grins, turning around, “so—”

Stiles awakens from the dream with a paw on his chest. He looks down into eyes that are still and dark and empty.

~-~-~

“You have a truly impressive self-destructive streak, Derek.” Lydia is staring across the table as Derek plays with his empty glass. He’s just finished his third glass of wolfsbane-laced wine. It’s enough to make even this dining room look tasteful. “And I’m not just talking about the fact that you carry fucking _wolfsbane_ around.”

Derek tries to sound sober but he slurs nonetheless. “It helps with something I don’t talk about with straight people.” She snorts into her glass and Derek cocks an eyebrow as their server glares from across the empty dining room. “No matter how well I know them.” Lydia seems to be searching her mind. “It’s not worth trying to figure out. You won’t. It’s a whole… _thing_.”

Lydia pauses for a moment, her eyes amused. “I can still call him, you know,” she says softly. “You’re sweet when you’ve been drinking.”

Derek chuckles. “You’re sweet when you’ve… what were we talking about?”

“Whatever I want. You two have to stop this. It’s excruciating.” She takes a sip of her wine. “For me, specifically.” She traces the lipstick along the rim of her glass absentmindedly, then stops abruptly. “He loves you, you know.”

Derek sighs, gesturing for a fourth glass. “I do know that. I’m just not sure that it matters.”

There is a quiet that shrouds the table between them, then. It becomes the distance marked out by the table. It grows until it becomes vast.

~-~-~

Stiles flicks on the television, starting a DVRed episode of some cop show where someone is saying that the police only mark chalk outlines of bodies when the victim survived and had to be moved. The wolf stirs suspenselessly. Stiles shifts his legs out from under his body, stretching them out, kicking the plate from the bed and watching as it falls toward the beige carpet. A small gesture of two fingers and it stops in midair, drops of blood buoyed by his magic. He glances at the duvet; there is a ring of deep red blood straining across it.

~-~-~

Derek glances down at his hand and realizes that Lydia’s is on top of it. She doesn’t say anything but smiles weakly. “Let’s go,” Derek says, and Lydia nods, throwing a few bills down on the table and curling an arm through the loop of his elbow as they walk out of the restaurant.

“I’m gonna call him, you know,” she tells him once they step out onto the sidewalk. It’s already getting dark. Fucking Chicago winters.

“You should feel free to call whomever you like,” Derek says, hailing a cab.

~-~-~

Stiles awakens with a start as his phone buzzes on his nightstand. He reaches for it, tips the plate off of the edge, fails to catch it this time. The meat hits the ground with a slap and the wolf answers with a wet hissing rasp, like the sound it makes when you burn scrambled eggs.

“Stiles,” Lydia says sweetly, having deposited Derek in his apartment. He grunts in futile protest. “Are you alright? Did I wake you? It’s only… five in Seattle.”

“I took the day off. What’s up?” He rubs his eyes and sits up. The wolf furrows its brow but doesn’t move.

Lydia’s voice turns serious. “Listen, Stiles—”

“Nope. Not having this conversation. Goodbye.” Stiles begins to pull the phone away from his face.

“Hang up on me and I’ll feed your cock to a dog.”

Stiles believes it. “What can I do for you?”

“Okay, so,” Lydia begins, “you know how you and Derek love each other but are really bad at it?”

“Lydia, this is really none of your busin—”

“When I said I’d feed your cock to a dog if you hung up on me, I really meant that I’d feed your cock to a dog if you did _anything_ but exactly what I want. I actually think it should be implicit by now.” Lydia gets out of her cab, pays the driver, and walks toward the brick steps beneath her building.

“So I’m listening. What do you want?”

“Oh, fuck it,” Lydia says, “you wouldn’t do it anyway. Plan B, then. Come see me.”

“What?” Stiles leans against his headboard, crossing one leg under the other. He breathes deeply.

“I’m texting you my address and I’ll have a ticket waiting for you at Sea-Tac. You have break soon, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah—”

“Spend it here. Derek’s going back to Beacon Hills for Christmas, as usual, so I know you won’t have plans. Come on. We’re overdue for a few days together.”

Stiles suddenly feels very tired. “Alright, I guess.”

~-~-~

The next day, the last day before winter break, Stiles wakes up with the smell of rotting meat in his nostrils. He rolls across the bed to pick up his phone to check the time when his fingers find the wolf’s flank. It is still and cool and its eyes are wide open, seeing nothing.


	6. Precautions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lydia's plan comes to fruition and Stiles and Derek collide once again, after all these years.

Stiles raps on the door, twice, sharply. “Lydia,” he calls from the hallway, shifting his backpack from one shoulder to the other. He pulls out his phone to text her when he feels a presence on the other side of the door.

Derek pulls the towel tighter around his waist, leaning against the solid wood. “You’re not supposed to be here, Stiles,” he says, his damp hair sticking to the door as he slumps toward the floor.

“Well, this is a surprise,” Stiles says, settling against the door and sliding toward the floor, his and Derek’s bodies in unison.

“What are you doing here? This… I didn’t expect this. I didn’t know to expect this.”

“Neither did I.”

“Why are you here? Or, there. On the other side of the door. Why are you in Chicago?”

“I’m supposed to be visiting Lydia. I think… it seems that she pulled one over on us.” His voice is grave but amused.

“Do you wanna come in?”

“I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

“Good. Because I’m not, either.” Derek chuckles and Stiles sets his bag down on the floor next to him.

“This is a lot. Being here, with you. On the other side of the door, I mean. So, being _there_ with you.”

Derek adjusts the towel, covering himself where he had peeked out. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. Do not.” Stiles scrubs a hand across his face, lays his face across his knees.

“I wanted you,” Derek says, weakly.

“You pitied me.”

“I _had_ you.”

“You borrowed me.”

“I loved you.”

“You failed me.” Stiles breathes deeply, leans his head against the door, and Derek is tempted to lean back against it when he hears the light thump, to get just _that_ much closer. “But I failed you, too.”

Derek stands up, his joints loosened by the shower. The towel falls to the floor, forgotten. He opens the door and Stiles falls into the doorway, scrambling to his feet, backing away.

Derek is naked, entirely. “Come in,” he says, a smile crowding the edges of his face, the lines deepening, the distance softening.

“Not while you’re looking at me like that.” Stiles is shaking his head, leaning against the frame. “You can’t look at me like that. It’s no fair.”

“How am I looking at you, Stiles? This is just… I’m not looking at you any kind of way.”

“Yes, you are. You are. You’re looking at me like…” Stiles begins to pace.

“Like what?”

Stiles stops, his back to the doorway. “Like you _forgive_ me!” he cries, bringing his hand to his face in an attempt to contain the words, push them back where they came from, but it’s too late. He leans against the frame and feels something solid behind him.

“Come inside,” Derek whispers through his smile, his chin hooked over Stiles’ shoulder.

~-~-~

Stiles had gone straight from Derek’s house to Scott’s, that night. He had sat in the Jeep in Scott’s driveway for an hour, beating his fists against the steering wheel. Sobs escaped his lips eagerly.

Melissa came out, after a while. She got into the passenger’s seat and explained that Scott was gone for the night, but she had called him, that he was on his way.

Scott arrived, his nose crinkling as he smelled the sex on Stiles, but unable to say anything about it in front of Melissa. Leaning into the driver’s side door, arms around Stiles as he wept bitterly, Melissa gestured toward the other side of the car with her head and slipped out. _Be safe_ , she had whispered in Scott’s ear as she left them.

Stiles couldn’t stop this buzzing, it was in his head, he couldn’t hear himself crying and explaining over the buzzing. It broke and Scott said _let’s go somewhere_.

Which is how Stiles wound up a complete sobbing mess, reeking of sex with his shirt on inside-out, at the bowling alley. They paid for a game and sat wearing their street shoes in the empty room, shadows dancing around its corners.

Stiles had buried his face in Scott’s shirt when he finished explaining, when he was out of words. The radio came on, blaring over the loudspeakers: _I’ll send you my love on the wire, lift you up every time, everyone, ooh, pulls away, ooh, from you-oo._

Stiles was saying _he wasn’t even gonna try to stay_ and _I would’ve given up anything for him_ and Scott just cocked his head and said _who?_ and suddenly Stiles was laughing. Laughing because he was sure Scott had known for months. Laughing because Scott had waited until after the story was over to ask who he was talking about. Because he knew that the person it was about didn’t matter, that Scott was on his side no matter what.

~-~-~

Stiles barely hesitates, wrapping his arms around Derek’s shoulders and slipping through the door like that’s where he belongs. Like that’s where he deserves to be. Their lips press urgently, mouthing _please please please_ and Stiles is suddenly reminded of that night, pressing his ear to Derek’s chest and saying “no fair” and the phrase _love is the shape that bleeds_ is smuggled into their embrace through the memory.

Derek breaks off, grabs his jacket from the back of a chair. He pulls a pouch from the pocket, crushes a little knob of some kind of herb between his fingers, spreads it across his pub-style dining room table. “What the fuck is that?” Stiles asks as he snorts it, returning to the kiss, his pupils dilating and his hands grasping.

“Wolfsbane,” Derek answers, helping Stiles shed his clothes. “It’s so…” Derek steps back, looking almost bashful, even in his total nudity. “It’s so you can hurt me. If you want.”

“Hurt you?” Stiles asks, pressing Derek into the wall. They grin into each other’s mouths.

Derek’s breath is jagged, rough. He grabs Stiles’ hand and guides it between his legs. “Or else I won’t be able to open up for you.”

 _Oh_ , Stiles thinks. “Oh,” Stiles says. “So that’s what we’re doing.”

“If you want,” Derek moans as Stiles’ index finger slips inside. “I know I do. Want, I mean.”

“Always best to take proper precautions,” Stiles says, slotting his body against Derek’s. “Tell me what you want. No euphemisms. No misunderstandings.” Stiles wraps his arms around Derek’s thighs, lifting him up, pressing his body between Derek’s legs. His feet press into the hardwood, creaking, as Derek’s shoulders bow the drywall behind him. The house groans almost as loudly as they do.

“I want you inside me. _Need_ you inside me. Right now.”

“You needed me inside you eight years ago,” Stiles whispers into his jawline, smirking as Derek unzips him, palming his length. Stiles feels a spark unlatching in the pit of his stomach and Derek’s laptop wakes up, an mp3 unraveling like an unseamed sweater.

A few plinking notes echo from a piano and then Karen O is singing _I was feeling sad, can’t help looking back, highways flew by. Run, run away, no sense of time, I’d like you to stay, want to keep you inside._ Stiles pulls Derek away from the wall and he’s pressing his hard cock into the fabric of Stiles’ shirt, craning over him, kissing him deeply as the veins in Stiles’ arms strain from the exertion. He sets Derek down on the dining table, and Derek pulls him in deep, kissing his jaw, his neck, kissing across the constellation of his body.

The song begins to build and the two of them are stumbling toward the bedroom, crashing into a bookshelf, knocking it to the floor with a crash—all that knowledge, all across the floor—as she sings _all along, not so strong without these open arms_ and they’re stepping on books, slipping across the hardwood. Derek steps on the overturned bookshelf and his foot goes through the thin wood across its back, nicking his ankle. He stumbles, yanking his foot free, setting his cock bouncing wetly across his thigh.

“We good?” Stiles asks, stepping around the bookshelf.

“Yeah,” Derek replies. “Definitely good.” He pulls Stiles’ shirt over his head, bringing his hand back between his legs, two fingers exploring him.

“That enough?” Stiles asks as he lays back on the bed, nodding. He spreads his legs and looks up at Stiles, his body laid out like territory freely ceded.

“You ready?”

“Have been,” Stiles grunts, “forever.” And then he’s inside him, looking down into Derek’s eyes, which are glazed with want. Stiles kicks out of his jeans, Derek gripping his ass, pulling him deeper inside.

 _Deeper_ , Derek thinks, as he throws his head back . _Always deeper. You can always get closer._ Derek pulls Stiles toward him but his hips stay rigid, thrusting inside him, filling him. He arches up off the bed, kissing Stiles’ neck, sucking below his earlobe, then setting his chin down on his shoulder.

Stiles wraps his hands around the muscles of his back, just above the curve of his ass, and feels a tremor go through him. He pulls back, stops thrusting. “You okay?” Derek throws himself back on the bed.

His cheeks are wet, eyes red, his fangs exposed. “More than okay.” He laughs through the tears. “I didn’t think I’d get to have this again.”

“What’s _this_?” Stiles asks, leaning down and kissing the salt from his cheeks.

“Happiness,” Derek says shyly, smiling up at him.

The track switches over and Anthony Kiedis is singing _what I’ve got you’ve got to give it to your momma_ and Stiles bursts out laughing. Derek can feel it inside him from where Stiles’ abdomen is shaking with the force of it. Stiles snaps the laptop shut with a flick of two fingers and turns to look at Derek. “Fucking shuffle,” he says, still laughing, his face silhouetted by the light from the streetlamp outside his window. They stay there, motionless, in the encroaching silence. _Yeah_ , Derek thinks, _happiness_.

“I love you, you know.” Derek smiles up at him, pulling himself up into an embrace.

“I know,” Stiles says, over his shoulder, his eyes distant. He hears a familiar buzzing in his ears, that old insect crescendo, the swarm of locusts that parts to reveal pieces of Derek’s begging:

“Tell me you love me.”

Though he knows that they’re nowhere, Stiles replies “I do.”

~-~-~

Derek wakes. He kisses Stiles on the forehead, leaning over him where he sleeps; he puts on the coffee; he slips into the shower. He scrubs last night from his body, stepping into the hallway to pour two cups of coffee, returns to his bedroom. He finds the bed made.

“Derek,” he hears from the hallway. Small. Defeated.

“What are you doing dressed? I was gonna make us breakfast in b—” His voice trails off.

“I have to go. This isn’t… this isn’t going to work. This isn’t who we are.” Stiles slings his bag over his shoulder and starts down the hallway, hand over his face.

“Stiles, wait!” Derek calls out, rushing to the threshold, but he can’t cross it. He looks down at his feet and sees the line of mountain ash.

Stiles steps back into the doorway, holds up an empty plastic baggie. “You’re not the only one who takes precautions, Derek.” He steps back away from the doorway, stands with his back to the wall, his breath catching in his chest, tears welling in his eyes.

Derek leans against the barrier, sparks flying, sizzling when they land on the rivulets of tears running down his cheeks. “Why can’t I touch you?” He pleads. “You’re right there.” Then quieter, “I can hear you breathing.”

“I’m sorry, Derek,” he gasps out, clenching his eyes shut as he sobs. “Last night, I… I thought things might be better this time. But we’re the same two broken fucks we’ve always been.”

Derek shakes his head, disgusted. “You sound like Peter when you talk like that.”

“You fuck like Peter,” Stiles spits, the lie coming easily, like prying someone’s fingers up where they cling to a stone ledge.

“Shut up,” Derek says, his face curled into a sneer. “You fucking asshole. Shut _up_.”

Stiles steps back into the doorway, his toes pressing against the doorway. Derek is splayed out, hands gripping the doorjamb, forehead sparking against the barrier. His face is inches from Stiles’ heart.

 _Love is the shape that bleeds_ , Stiles thinks, as he leans down and cups Derek’s jaw with fingers that still smell of him.

Derek looks up at him, eyes glistening and pleading, but defeated. He knows how this ends. This is how it’s always been with Stiles. “Why can’t you just _love_ me? I’m right _here_.”

Stiles presses a gentle kiss to his lips, and Derek leans into it as blankness rushes in around the edges of his perception.

Derek stands at the doorway, mind distracted by the tidal pull of unanswered questions: why he’s naked, where these bruises came from, how his cheeks got so salt-chapped, what happened to his apartment. He closes the door and steps back into his apartment to right the bookshelf and return everything to its proper place.


	7. Pumpkin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a flashback, Stiles and Derek cook together, and talk about the future.

Stiles shooed Derek into the kitchen, hands nimbly playing across his lower back and ass as he tried to arch and twist out of the way, a thick arm wrapping around Stiles’ shoulders and pulling him into an embrace. Stiles closed his eyes and felt the roughness of Derek’s stubble against his chin as their lips came together softly.

“Come on,” Stiles said. “I didn’t get you out of bed for nothing.” He grasped Derek’s hand and pulled him the rest of the way into the kitchen. A small kitchen towel lay on the counter, propped up in the center by some upright thing, looking for all the world like a ghost or half-destroyed carnival tent. Stiles removed the towel with a flourish, shouting “Ta-da!” and beaming.

Derek scowled, his nose curling up. “It’s… a can of pumpkin, Stiles.”

“Damn right it is,” Stiles replied, still grinning ear to ear.

Derek turned to walk back to the door. “I’m going back to bed.” He found his way blocked by a no-longer-smirking Stiles, arms crossing his chest and impatience furrowing his brow.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to find pumpkin in May?” Stiles brought a hand up to Derek’s chest, knowing full well he couldn’t physically stop him from leaving. Magically, maybe, but not in a contest of brute strength.

“Not the faintest, but if you’re implying it’s hard to find, then that’s probably because _nobody eats pumpkin in May, Stiles_.”

Stiles’ grin returned. “We do. Or, we will, actually. Besides, my dad won’t be back until tonight. We have all day to hang out.”

Derek gave Stiles a peck on the cheek and darted around him, slouching toward the door. “When the sun comes up, I’ll come back and we can eat the pumpkin or whatever. Until then, I’m going to bed.”

“It’s for _pancakes_ ,” Stiles whispered in his ear.

Derek stopped dead in his tracks. He spun on his heel, finding Stiles just behind him, grinning. Derek strips off his jacket, rolling up the sleeves of his henley, muttering under his breath as he searches the cabinets for a mixing bowl: “You _always_ lead with pancakes.”

~-~-~

Derek was pressed against his body, the curve of Stiles’ back aching into Derek’s form, their breath synchronized as Stiles stirred together spices. Derek handed Stiles the can opener, as he prepared to cover his ears to shield them from the grate and grind of the screeching tin.

“Pumpkin for my pumpkin,” Stiles said, kissing the tip of his nose and getting a colossal eyeroll for his trouble. He made quick work of the lid, peeling it back and gesturing obtrusively to Derek that it was safe to uncover his ears. He dumped the purée into the mixing bowl and leaned back to the adjacent counter to read the recipe. Something stopped him.

“I don’t want you to go away,” Derek said, pulling him into his arms. Stiles curled into the touch, his breath hot against Derek’s clavicle.

“It’s senior year. It’s what you do. You go away. It’s what’s _done_.” Stiles looked up at Derek, his eyes tired from too much lost sleep, too many dreams startled to waking. His gaze was clumsy over Derek’s features. “You can come with me.”

“Stiles…” Derek said. His fingers played across his pale face, a thumb skidding across his bottom lip.

Stiles sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes, sighed. He turned away, gesturing broadly with a whisk. “It was just a thought. I mean, just a momentary thought.” He poured the batter in little pools. “Not even a thought, really, because that implies… thinking. I mean, I haven’t really thought about it. You, I mean, with me, in Chicago. It was just a _notion_ , really, or the thing that comes _before_ a no—”

“We could get married in Chicago,” Derek cut in. Stiles didn’t have to turn around to know that he was wearing a mask of cautious optimism, hiding the giddiness straining beneath it.

“That’s not something you say unless you mean it,” Stiles muttered, flipping the pancakes. His voice hardly rose above the whisper of the frying pan on the stove, but he knew that Derek could hear.

“I know that.” Derek’s voice dipped in the middle, wavering, the humming grunt of the N tingling across his teeth.

And then Stiles was on him. In the quiet of the Stilinski family kitchen, with its groaning floorboards and its slanting morning light, their lips touched and parted and touched again. Hands, tucked beneath cloth that drifted between wringing torsos, skidded across warm flesh. A blush crept across Stiles’ clavicle, no longer untickled by lips, then Derek’s Adam’s apple bobbed between Stiles’ lips. They broke apart after some time, panting, staring each other down.

Stiles backed away, leaning against the wall, grinning smugly. “You wanna marry me. You _totally_ wanna gay-marry me. You’re, like, head-over-heels in love with this guy.” He cocked his thumbs toward his face, his grin growing impossibly wide.

Derek started toward him, then turned, his nose burning at the acrid smell of burning pumpkin and nutmeg and cinnamon. Stiles followed, reaching the stove and tossing the frying pan into the sink just as the fire alarm sounded. Derek flipped on the water and pinned Stiles against the counter. He slid up onto it, wrapping his legs around Derek’s waist.

Derek planted one hand on the edge of the sink, the other tilting Stiles’ chin toward his. The kiss was slow and deliberate, unhurried like the dripping of an IV.

“Yes,” Stiles said, leaning toward him. Thrown off his balance, Derek threw his hand back, catching it on the orange ring of the stove. His flesh began to knit around the burn as he gritted his teeth. Stiles grinned into his mouth, whispering, “yes, Mr. Hale, I will mar—”

~-~-~

Stiles awakens with a start, the smell of pumpkin curling through his nose as the city’s eerie quiet pulls at something under his ribs. So many miles and failures away, Derek turns over on sweat-soaked sheets, smelling spice and himself, both burning.


	8. Shelter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a flashback, Stiles and Peter connect, and in the present, Stiles reaches out to Derek.

“Well, this is… unprecedented,” Peter said, turning away from the doorway and letting Stiles slip through. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” He was working a narrow nimble saw through the drywall of the hotel room, claiming a thin ribbon of wall around the painting he was trying to claim.

Stiles cocked an eyebrow at him. “Doing some redecorating? Or, uh, looting?” He approached a stack of postcards on the desk.

“Technically it still belongs to me. As do those postcards. _Nosy_. It’s just the land that’s been sold. I can take anything in the building before they blow it up tomorrow.” He smirked. “And I intend to.”

“Seems like a lot of work for a mass-produced painting of… what is that, exactly? Your family has questionable taste, dude.” Stiles shucked off his jacket and stepped toward Peter, watching little feathers of shredded drywall aching toward the carpet.

“It’s an anchor,” Peter said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Sweat pooled along his furrowed brow. “And aren’t you walking proof of the Hale family’s questionable taste?”

Stiles flinched but stepped closer, inspecting the painting. _So it is_ , he thought, eyeing the details: the light stuttering through the green water, the silt breaking free in a cloud as the anchor pulled free from the yearning earth. “Huh, I suppose it is.”

Peter looked at him, amusement cracking his concentration. “So, my question? What are you doing here?”

“Lydia texted me,” Stiles said, toeing the carpet. “She said you were in town. In case I wanted company.”

“Ah.” Peter sucked his teeth. “Your friend Lydia loves giving people as presents.”

“That she does,” Stiles said, shucking off his coat, which was flecked with snow. “She’s inimitable. I’ve only been in Seattle for a few months, but I’m already looking for someone to fill the gap.”

“Judging by…” Peter gestured imperiously to the room around them. “It seems like that’s not the only gap that needs filling.”

“Lewd!” Stiles protested, throwing up his hands and stalking over to the window. He drew the heavy black blinds, feeling Peter press up against him from behind. Peter’s hand was soft but firm as it slowly tilted Stiles’ head to the side. Stiles moaned as Peter gnawed his neck, gently pulling at the skin. “Lewd…” he muttered softly.

Peter turned him sharply, claiming soft lips roughly, hands gripping lithe hips. A hum rose in the back of Stiles’ throat as Peter pressed him against the curtains. He lifted his hands to Peter’s shoulders, gripping the linen of his shirt, watching the light slatting in through the shifting curtains glance off of his form. His eyes shone in the light, his smile glinting. He pressed his cheek against Stiles’, whispering “I think we should take this to the bedroom” into his ear.

The bulge of Stiles’ throat shifted as he swallowed, considering, then nodded. He took a step toward Peter, then stopped as the curtains held him fast. He sputtered, apologizing ineffectually as he spun. He took Peter down with him, hitting the floor with a thud that was punctuated by a breathy chuckle. “Well,” Stiles said, smiling, “this is going well.”

Peter’s voice came out as a growl. “Bed. Now.”

“Aye,” Stiles said, reaching up in a mock salute that ended with him punching himself in the jaw. He yelped, holding his chin in his hand.

Peter kissed the tilt of his chin. “You’re a menace.”

“That I am.”

Peter hauled him up to his feet by his shirt, the buttons on his flannel popping. Lust crept into Peter’s eyes from the edges as Stiles wrapped his legs around his waist, grinding against him.

“Bed.” Stiles grinned. “Now.”

They stumbled toward the bedroom, Peter tripping out of his pants, Stiles clutching his shoulders. Their lips colliding, jaws levering against chins, thumbs pressing against cheeks, fingers trembling as they undressed each other.

“Get on the bed,” Peter breathed, threading his fingers through Stiles’ hair and yanking his neck back, watching the pale arch of his throat thrum as his pulse climbed. “I wanna see you spread open.”

Stiles closed his mouth, swallowed hard, his breath shuddering as he whispered, “Then you should do the spreading.” Stiles felt Peter guiding him toward the bed, its mahogany form simultaneously imposing and inviting. “I take back what I said about the painting. You have good taste.”

“Mmhmm,” Peter mumbled distractedly, watching Stiles’ lips. “And it’s comfortable too.”

Stiles grinned. “This is good. This is a no-violins kind of thing,” he said, toeing his shoes off. “No drama. Just sex.” They both watched as it bounced off the carpet and under the bed. “Uh, remind me to get that in the morning. These are my favorite shoes, and I’d hate for them to get blown u—”

“Shut up,” Peter said, lips pressing firmly against the source of the noise. “I’ll have to remind you,” he whispered coolly, voice ringing with condescension. He tilted his head to the side, lips a fraction of an inch from Stiles’ ear. “You won’t even remember your name by morning.”

Stiles shuddered, closing his eyes, but continued: “You know, there are days when I don’t actually remember how to pronounce my name. It’s a little problematic, you know, all… post-Soviet and stuff.”

“Yes, I remember,” Peter said, “you always reminded me of this one Bel Ami scene from a few years b—”

Stiles cut him off. “Peter?”

Peter grinned against the side of his face. “Yes, Stiles?”

“Shut up.”

Peter grinned, acquiescing. Then Stiles was on top of him: unbuttoning, unzipping, uncovering, unrelenting. His breath sagging heavy in his chest, Stiles groaned as Peter’s dick came into view. “This,” he announced, gripping it by the base, it falling over the back of his thumb, his foreskin grazing a knuckle, “ _this_ is unfair.” He inched closer to it, licking his lips.

“Yes, I’m quite gifted, thanks,” Peter drawled, fingertips tickling the back of Stiles’ head.

Stiles looked up at him as he sank down toward the base, feeling him twitch and thicken in his mouth. He hummed against the thick crosshatch of hair under his nose as he hastily pulled his jeans down to his knees, busying himself with his own cock. Then a realization passed over him and he pulled off with a _pop_ that turned Peter’s ribcage into a hinge. “How do I look with a mustache?” Stiles asked, going down on him once more, grinning around his girth, as Peter’s usually steely façade cracked.

He laughed, tapping Stiles on the chin, extracting his length from his throat, and gestured _up, up, up_ , where he greeted him with eager kisses when he arrived. And then he was going down on Stiles, swallowing him easily, tasting everything he could produce, smelling the hurried anticipation where it wafted from his body. Peter growled, lifting Stiles’ hips off the bed and flipping him over. Stiles hummed low in his throat as Peter divested him of the rest of his clothes, watching as he lowered himself behind him. He sucked in a deep breath as a finger pulled at the rim of his hole. He felt humid breath on his asshole as Peter licked his lips.

“Is this happening or what?” Stiles asked, turning to look over his shoulder, expecting to see Peter. He put his head down on the mattress when he realized he wasn’t there. “Peter? Fuck me with your tongue already,” Stiles whined, flipping over and bucking his hips as his hole winked for Peter.

“Watch it, kid," Peter growled from across the room, "I could bite you. Turn your asshole into a werewolf.”

“A were-asshole?” Stiles asked incredulously, the pitch of his voice softened, its husky tones turned amused.

Peter vaulted toward him, tossing a small bottle of lube onto the bed. He kissed him asymmetrically, pinning the corner of his mouth with his lips. “Yes. A were-asshole.”

Stiles smiled across Peter’s mouth. “You're a were-asshole.” He grinned, ignoring Peter’s flinching as he said, “You know, it’s nice, to be able to do this and it’s just fun. Nothing more, no hidden agendas, no strings.”

“Violins or otherwise,” Peter said darkly as he kissed down Stiles’ spine, tongue curling toward his pink twitch. He breathed over it again, chuckling over Stiles’ impatient _come on_ s and _oh my god_ s, before planting the tip of his tongue directly in the center. Stiles groaned, pressing his hips back, trying to force Peter’s tongue deeper inside him, moaning and thrashing. His cursing echoed through the otherwise-silent room until he pulled a sheaf of crumpled pillowcase into his mouth, leaving only Peter’s snuffling and lapping to fill the void.

Peter experimentally slipped a finger inside Stiles, pulling at the rim again, watching the muscles of his ass roll in reaction, closing him momentarily and pulling his balls toward his taint. He chuckled and Stiles spat out the pillowcase, demanding _more, more of that_ , before he gagged himself with them once more. Peter dove in, crowding fingers in alongside his tongue, nuzzling against him, leaving a trail of tingling nerves as his stubble scraped over sensitive flesh. He pulled back, drizzling lube over two fingers and working them deep inside him, watching as Stiles’ back arched and quivered.

“Peter?” Stiles whispered, barely audible even to his heightened senses. Peter stilled, the tips of his fingers trembling against his prostate. “Don’t be gentle.”

Peter gripped his cock, slicking it as he pressed it against Stiles’ entrance. Stiles pressed his stomach against the mattress, curving his back as he provided the needed counter to allow Peter to slip inside. They groaned, and Peter leaned forward, hands knuckling into the mattress on either side of Stiles’ shoulders as he peppered the back of his neck with kisses. Stiles rolled against Peter, pulling him deeper inside and massaging his thickness with the taut rim of his hole.

“Oh god, Peter,” Stiles moaned, his voice breathy and almost pale. “Deeper. _Deeper._ ”

Peter did as he was told, his hips pressing against the curve of Stiles’ ass, giving him more than what he thought was his full length. He felt him writhing beneath him, his hole quaking with each thrust. “I’m getting close,” Peter breathed out, his mouth against the brief curve of jaw just below Stiles’ ear.

“Flip me over,” Stiles panted, “now, I don’t wanna ruin the sheets.”

Peter chuckled. “The sheets are gonna get blown up, remember?” A fond smile softened across his face.

“Fuck that!” Stiles exclaimed. “These are Egyptian cotton! I’m taking these home!” He made grabby hands behind him, grasping Peter’s wrist across his back, letting him deftly flip him without withdrawing. He grinned up at the older man sweating above him, their faces an inch apart. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Peter whispered smoothly, grinning as he continued to thrust punishingly. Stiles’ shoulders inched up the bed as Peter gripped his hips. “You ready?” Peter felt a familiar stirring sensation in his stomach as he watches Stiles’ body go limp with post-orgasmic bliss. He hastily tried to pull out, but it was too late. The knot at the base of his cock was already starting to swell. Stiles’ hole gripped him and pulled him in deeper and he began to fill what was empty.

Stiles was too lost in pleasure to notice, turning animal beneath him, throwing his head back and moaning as his orgasm overtook him and his cock twitched. He moaned and bit out, “Derek!” as he came across his stomach, long stripes that began to soften to opacity from his body heat as soon as they formed. Stiles lay there, eyes clenched shut, frozen, his mind sodden with hormones but racing nonetheless. He knew what he would see if he opened his eyes. Peter would be there, eyes aglow and staring intently. He would be staring the way that you stared at someone you love, at the person you wanted to be your mate. _Oh god, I said this was_ nice _. Oh_ god _, I called him Derek_ , he thought as he opened his eyes.

He was wrong. Peter’s eyes were not glowing. They were shut so tightly that his damp cheeks were trembling. He reached toward the older man and he pulled away, batting at his hand defeatedly. Stiles gripped his shoulder, pulling him down on top of him.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles said, “I didn’t know. Lydia didn’t know either. She couldn’t have. She never would hav—”

“I never said for whom,” Peter gritted out shakily against Stiles’ shoulder.

“What?”

“When I said that Lydia liked to give people as gifts, I didn’t specify who was being given to whom.”

“Oh,” Stiles said, shifting under Peter’s weight. Then, “ _Oh_. Right.” He carded his fingers awkwardly through Peter’s hair. “So, how long does this usually, uh, last?”

Peter chuckled, and Stiles cringed at the wet scrape of his stubble on his shoulder. “You mean it never happened with…?” Peter turned his head, light from the evening outside the window framing his face.

“Yeah, his name’s been said enough tonight,” Stiles said, averting his gaze. “No, it never did. Does that mean—”

“It doesn’t mean he didn’t love you. It’s tricky. It’s complicated. If a noun is just the fulcrum between being and nonbeing, then love is a hell of a hinge.” Peter smiled grimly. “He loved you. Loves you, really, if we’re being honest.”

Stiles squirmed as Peter planted a hand in the mattress, lifting off of him slightly. “I don’t know how this happened. Any of it. Do you ever wonder how things got so fucked up?”

Peter sighed against Stiles’ chest, his finger idly catching the soft edge ridging his pectoral. “We all make decisions. Sometimes those decisions lead us to _this—_ ”

“Whatever this is.” Stiles grimaced, turning away.

“ _This_ ,” Peter said, tilting Stiles’ head back toward him, eyes soft, “is my dream coming true in the worst way possible. There’s probably a German word for that.”

“There’s probably a different German word for it happening in a hotel that’s due to be demolished in twelve hours. God, is there any shelter more temporary than that?”

Peter laughed, his knot pulling at Stiles’ hole as his body shook on top of him. Stiles groaned in protest and Peter stilled. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s been years and you still don’t understand what you are, why you’re so important.”

Stiles looked at him quizzically, tilting his head and swallowing hard.

“You’re the sun. You’re the thing we all orbit around. You’re the burning at the center of the universe, the pull that we always feel. But,” he said, kissing Stiles on the cheek as his knot finally softened enough to withdraw, “that’s also why we can never get too close or stay too far away.”

“But—” Stiles began, pulling himself up on his elbows.

Peter cut him off as he pulled on his shirt. “It gets cold out here at the edges of space,” he said matter-of-factly.

~-~-~

The next morning, Peter was awakened by a scrabbling. He peeked over the edge of the bed and saw Stiles, half under the bed, straining for something that was just out of reach. He slid out from under the covers and lifted the bed slightly, edging underneath. “Care to join me? Some things are clearer in the dark,” he said, grinning in the darkness.

Stiles slid in next to him, curled up against his side, the linen of his shirt crinkling slightly against the steady swell of his breathing. “Wait,” he said, lying down flat as Peter lowered the bed on top of them, “how much time do we have until demolition? Do people know we’re in here?”

“Relax,” Peter said, “they can’t blow me up. I’m their _boss_.”

“Well, that’s their motive right there,” Stiles said, grinning.

Peter didn’t smile. “You know, we’ve sold off family assets before. Just after you-know-what. Brings new meaning to the phrase ‘fire sale’ if you ask me.” He chuckled darkly. “Everything must go.”

Stiles stared at the underside of the mattress, dusty springs held up by unfinished wood. “You can say that again.”

The silence cracked, shattered by an exasperated voice reading a script through a bullhorn: “ _This is a legally-mandated notice that this building will be demolished in one hour. Any squatters, malingerers, or ne’er-do-wells who remain in the building after such time do so at their own risk._ ” Then, for good measure, “ _Get the fuck out._ ”

Peter chuckled, grabbing Stiles’ shoe and lifting the bed once more. “I think he means us.”

~-~-~

An hour later, sitting in Stiles’ Jeep in the parking lot across the street, they watched the building crumble. “It’s amazing,” Stiles said, sipping an enormous Slurpee from the convenience store three blocks away with a bundle of sheets crumpled in his lap, “where there used to such an enormous building, there’s nothing. And in no time at all. Talk about a fulcrum between being and nonbeing.” He dragged on his Slurpee, eyeing Peter as he chewed the straw.

“Nonbeing? Are you kidding me? Look at all that stuff! It’s no more gone than—” He swallowed hard, closed his eyes, reshuffled the postcards in his hands, continued. “It’s not gone. Just arranged differently.”

“And without all the space,” Stiles offered.

“And without all the space,” Peter replied, sipping his own Slurpee.

Stiles turned, then thought better of it turned away, putting his hand on Peter’s where it dangled between the seats. “I really am sorry,” he whispered to the windshield, which was caked with dust and ash that continued to pour out as the ruins settled.

Stiles felt a tug at his wrist and by the time he had turned to look, he heard the door slam, leaving him alone in the car with his sheets, a stack of postcards, and a painting of an anchor tearing itself free from the ocean floor.

Peter walked toward the edge of the parking lot, set his cup down on the pavement, and turned. He waved to Stiles, but in the shifting ash-filled wind he had already lost his face.

~-~-~

Stiles glances at the clock, which is just ticking over from 4:32 to 4:33, and feels an arm wrap around his waist.

“You must be cold,” Henry says, offering him an edge of bedding. “What are you doing still up?”

“Nothing,” Stiles says, standing up to run his finger over the edge of the drywall frame-around-a-frame holding the painting of the anchor. A longing that he would call homesickness if he any place were home creeps up through his gut, pointing south like an animal begging for attention. He turns and smiles weakly at Henry—poor, stupid Henry. “Just thinking about somebody I used to know. If I told you the story, you’d swear you’d heard it before. It’s just one of those things.”

Henry shrugs, turning over, and Stiles opens his laptop, hitting Compose and starting an email: “Derek…”


	9. More

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles decides to take drastic action.

Derek,

I’m nervous writing this. You make me nervous. Not on purpose, I don’t think. Or, not on purpose anymore, I don’t think. I think it used to be very much on purpose, when I was just some kid you knew. Some awkward twitchy kid, so tenuous and embarrassed. Sometimes I miss that person.

I dream about you sometimes. There, I said it, I admitted it, you know it now. Okay, more than sometimes, closer to a lot. I’ll wake up and Henry—you don’t know Henry, but he’s this person who doesn’t know that he and I are dating—will be looking at me all concerned even though he doesn’t think he knows me and he’ll ask me who Derek is and I’ll say “what?” and he’ll say I was saying your name in my sleep and he’ll ask again with his furrowed brow and his jaw all tight and I’ll say that I don’t know and I’ll mean it.

He and I could be happy, I guess, if I made room. Not happy like you and I could’ve been happy, but happy enough. Henry and I could be happy in an average way, a normal way, happy in the way that people are when they don’t have to rearrange the universe to make that happiness possible. Diet happiness. C-minus happiness.

Jesus, is there anything more pathetic than speculating about how happy we might have been? I know I do it a lot, and I know you do too, even though you don’t remember me asking. I’m sorry about that, by the way, but I don’t think I’m a safe person to be around. For you, sure, but also for myself. But I can’t get away from myself, even as I become less myself and more the paper on which I write love letters to you that say nothing but goodbye.

That’s the hard thing about wanting something that’s bad for you and that thing you want is another person. I wouldn’t have gone to Chicago if I had known it would be you behind that door. I would’ve stayed, coward that I am, in my own little timezone, my own little neighborhood, my own little sphere of whatever the opposite of satisfaction is.

Desire, probably. The opposite of satisfaction, I mean. Because I do. Desire you, I mean. I want you like breathing, and all the time. I want not to have ever forgotten how you smell. I want to kiss your eyes closed and smile against them while I guide your fingers down my body like spiders. I want to taste your sweat and learn to breathe in your atmosphere again. I want to take up residence at the base of your spine. I want to tell you to love me and hardly even wait for you to tell me that you do before I tell you to love me better. I want to be unwisely happy with you and leave Henry to find his own ill-advised happiness with someone who won’t take his memories from him whenever they fuck him.

Do you ever wish that we had tried harder? Or been less scared? I think about that a lot, too. How we burned in the possibility of one moment and were extinguished at the realization that there were other, better moments, or more moments, or longer ones, or ones without lingering doubts tickling the backs of the tongues of our brains, which are wagging in an endless chorus of “enough.”

I think about _that_ a lot, too, how we got cheated out of something good, how there might be some other pair of us in some parallel comic-book universe who figured out how to make it work. I’d like to sit down for coffee with that other, better Stiles. I think if I did, he would tell me to be less scared, or scared differently. Maybe he would just chuckle and chew his swizzle stick and tell me to be scared _with you_. The problem is, growing up in Beacon Hills, I got used to our particular terrors. I think it’s the deviations that scared me more than anything. That sinking-stomach moment where it dawns on you that this monster takes a stronger trick than killing.

Henry’s lying next to me right now, looking for all the world like a version of you who doesn’t make me sick to think about, and fuck me for admitting this but I resent him. The funny thing is that I don’t resent him nearly as much as I resent you, but what I resent him for is not being you. He’s sweating in his sleep. I hate Seattle in June. This fucking city is on fire. I envy it.

So here’s what it is: I realized the other day that the only thing I want more than to be with you is not to want to be with you. And, being that I have more control than most over the elemental forces of the universe, I’m going to do something about it. I don’t know why I’m telling you this—I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—but you’ve got one shot to stop me. Midnight on the next new moon. You know where.

I’d say I hope I see you there, but we’ve both endured enough sputtering half-truths for one lifetime. The ball’s in your court, Derek. Have you had enough yet? I don’t know if I have or not.

—Stiles.

~-~-~

Stiles reads over the email, cringing at some of the admissions, fingers dangling over the delete key like as if it were a candle, and adds a final line below the signature: “P.S. Please be sure.”

As far as grand gestures go, it’s not bad. It could use a little more self-awareness, Stiles thinks, but all in all it’s serviceable. It does the work of informing Derek without obliging him. Henry stirs and curls his belly around Stiles’ back. He smiles up at Stiles from beneath his right forearm, kissing it gently before closing his eyes and breathing deeply. Stiles smiles insincerely, clicks “Send,” and closes the laptop, holding it up against his chest. He can feel its gentle organs whirring hollowly inside its warm body.

More than what’s there, he thinks about what’s not. The sound of paper hitting a hardwood floor. The firm coldness of the steering wheel underneath his knuckles. How he could still feel Derek inside him like a phantom limb as Scott rubbed his back and listened to his sobbing. He can still taste all that spilled salt. And if he closes his eyes and the air is still, he can still taste Derek, can summon some burnt likeness. And he can still hear, after all these years, the blurred edges around the question that he never asked, never dared: _why did you let me go?_

Stiles starts as fingertips creep across his lower back. “Still up? Must be a hell of a somebody you used to know,” Henry whispers, grinning and vaulting up onto an elbow to catch Stiles in a kiss as he turns away. In the siren-spun hours before dawn, when the thrumming of streetlights occupies the streets like a fog, Henry tastes salt on Stiles’ cheek. He latches onto his chin with three fingers, tilting his head to let moonlight stream in, glinting off the rivulets still tumbling down his cheeks. “Hey,” Henry says, drawing closer, “you okay?”

Stiles takes a deep breath and stands up. “I have to go home.” He sets the laptop on his desk and takes a few steps over to his dresser and begins to pull socks out of his top drawer, dropping them unceremoniously in a pile on the floor.

“Home?” Stiles can hear the overserious tone in Henry’s voice. It would almost be funny if any of this were ever anything but awful. “I thought you lived here.”

Stiles pulls his suitcase down from the high shelf in his closet. “No, I don’t,” he says, hand nervously swiping across his face, smearing tears he doesn’t even know are there.

Henry tiptoes across the room, hooking his chin over Stiles’ shoulder as he struggles the suitcase’s zipper open. “Where’s home, then?”

“Somewhere else,” Stiles mutters absentmindedly, already halfway to the other room.

~-~-~

The sun has just broken in Chicago as Derek sits down to his desk, a mug of coffee steaming in the mid-June morning. He eyes the pile of finals he has left and takes a deep breath. He opens his laptop and takes a sip, closing his eyes at the bitter burn so he doesn’t notice the number next to his spam tab click over from eight to nine.


	10. Rewind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stiles goes home.

Stiles stands awkwardly outside the front door of Scott and Allison’s house, hands bottomed out in the shallows of his pockets. He considers knocking, decides against it, and takes a seat on the front step. His knees are cool in the early summer air as he rests his cheek against them. The wind lazily stirs the trees up and down the street, dragging the torn flap of canvas covering the Jeep. There is an ambivalence in the quiet; this place is unsure of Stiles, unsure if he should be here. He takes in a deep breath and blinks slowly, sensing the hot press of headlights across his face as his eyes water.

A pair of mop-headed rugrats tumble out of Scott and Allison’s SUV, and Stiles’ face brightens as he looks up, grimacing as he looks directly into the light. The kids tackle him from both sides, crying out “Uncle Stiles! Uncle Stiles!” in a shrill chorus as they knock Stiles over.

“Scott! Allison! Your children are assaulting me!” Stiles shouts in mock-panic, flailing under the squirming limbs. Giggles drown him out.

“Kids, get inside, Uncle Stiles had a long drive, he can’t play tonight,” Scott chides, clicking the SUV’s doors locked with his keychain remote.

Allison beams and extracts Stiles from the dogpile, pulling him into a tight hug. “Good to be home?” she asks into his shoulder as it relaxes against her.

“Good to be home,” he nods, forcing a smile. He turns as Scott sidles up, clapping him on the shoulder. “We drinking?”

“Oh, _god_ yes,” Allison answers for Scott. “Let me put the pups to bed and I’ll meet you in the kitchen.” She cups the side of Stiles’ face, running her thumb across the corner of his eye. “We’ll get you all fixed up, Stiles. Promise.”

Stiles grimaces, following them inside as Scott runs his hand across the back of his neck. He shrugs out of the embrace, and Scott flinches. “Sorry,” he whispers, eyes pointed toward the ground. “Just, I’m not used to pack stuff. Slow, okay?”

“Jesus, Stiles, it’s not like we’re behind the bleachers. Slow is fine.” Scott grins. “We _will_ get you fixed up. Allison’s right.”

“That’s the point,” Stiles grinds out. “That’s why I’m here.”

~-~-~

“So how long has it been since the email?” Allison is asking, holding up a finger for Stiles to wait to answer as she whirs a pitcher of margaritas. “Are we talking twenty-four hours?” She pours one margarita. “Forty-eight?” Another. “ _Seventy-two?_ ”

Stiles takes a long sip, dragging the slushy liquid into his mouth, feeling the sweet burn against his tongue. “Eight days,” he chokes out, the glass half-drained.

Allison looks scandalized. She turns to Scott. “Remind me to raid my dad’s place and pick up some olfsbane-way ullets-bay.”

“Not funny.” Scott frowns. “And you can use actual words. The kids are out like David Hasselhoff.”

It’s Allison’s turn to frown. “Aww, honey, that’s mean.” She takes a sip. “And dated.”

“Sorry I don’t TMZ like everybody else.” Scott shrugs sheepishly.

“Okay,” Stiles interrupts, “you two are so cute it’s gross. Back to the _eight days_ I’ve been waiting to hear back on my last-ditch love’s-last-breath email, please?” He rolls his eyes, holding out his glass for a refill.

“I mean, look at the bright side, Stiles,” Scott says, smiling obliviously, “what’s eight days when it’s already been years?”

Stiles drops his forehead onto the surface of the countertop on their kitchen island as Allison places a newly-filled glass next to his head. “Not. Helping. Dude.”

Allison quietly chides Scott as Stiles collects himself. Scott lays his head down next to Stiles’. “Do you wanna explain what happened to the Jeep’s roof? Maybe that’ll be easier than,” he gestures toward Stiles, “all of this.”

“I was hoping you hadn’t noticed,” Stiles groans, words pulled into a slur by the alcohol and the pressure of the countertop against his cheek, “it’s not a good story.”

“There are very few actually good stories, Stiles, this one just needs to be true,” Allison says, whirring another batch of margaritas.

Stiles sits up, takes a swig, grimaces. “These are too strong,” he whines, “and too festive.”

“You’ll drink it and you’ll enjoy it,” Allison grouses. “It’s left over from Cinco de Mayo.”

Stiles brightens. “Aww, I just realized your babies are little Mexican and French werewolf pups. They’re like a high school foreign language department.”

Allison giggles and Scott stares at him. “Stiles,” he whispers gravely, “werewolves don’t _have_ a language.” Allison bursts into laughter, and Scott pounces on her, covering her mouth to keep her from waking up the pups. “So what about the Jeep?” he asks as Allison peppers his cheek with small light kisses.

Stiles drops his forehead back onto the countertop with a dull thud. “It’s like this,” he sighs, “I kept checking my email, but then I got into a dead zone, and I didn’t have any reception, so I—”

“You climbed on the Jeep’s roof?” Allison interjects, stone-faced.

Stiles nods, the side of his face rubbing against the cool marble.

“Its _canvas_ roof,” she clarifies.

Stiles nods again.

“Well,” Scott claps his hands together, taking Stiles’ drink from the counter and draining the last of it, “at least you didn’t die.”

It’s Stiles who wakes the pups with laughter.

~-~-~

The next morning, Scott awakens to an eerie quiet. He checks his bedside clock. 7:20. Too late for that quiet to be normal. He lopes out of bed, wrapping himself in a flannel robe and limps down the stairs, rubbing his bleary eyes.

Allison is standing in the kitchen, digging peanut butter out of a heavily duct-taped jar of peanut butter with an eight-inch Bowie knife. The blade slides through the plastic shell, and she curses lightly and digs through the kitchen drawers. Holding a roll of duct tape aloft triumphantly, she bandages the newest hole and continues scooping with the inappropriate instrument.

Scott settles in behind her. “I smell pancakes.” He grins against her neck.

“Well, honey,” she grins, “that’s because there _are_ pancakes.”

“What did I tell you?” He drags slow kisses against her skin, kisses that are used to the back of her neck, kisses that have matured and become lazy through the years. “Werewolf senses.”

She giggles and pushes him away playfully, dimples in full force as she leans over to peck him on the tip of his nose.

“Dude,” Stiles groans from the living room, “even _I_ can smell the pancakes, and I have no supernatural senses to speak of.” His voice is jagged, and eerie sounds form a backdrop.

Penny drags a blanket from the living room, thumb in her mouth, asking, “Can we watch another movie? Uncle Stiles keeps go-back-ing the same scene.”

Scott picks her up, fitting her easily into the crook of his neck. “What’s the scene, kiddo?”

“There’s a horse,” she says sincerely, eyes big and glassy, “and he’s stuck in some mud and can’t get out. And his person has to leave him behind. He keeps go-back-ing. It was sad,” she moans, “ _and then it got funny_ ,” she whispers, “and then it got sad again.”

Scott turns to Allison, eyebrows raised in concern. She sets down the peanut butter and makes grabby-hands at Penny. “Go,” she says, “I got her.” Scott hands Penny off and rushes into the living room where Vic is staring silently at Stiles as Stiles stares at the screen. _The Neverending Story_ is playing, just getting to the end of the Swamp of Sadness piece, and Stiles tilts the remote at the screen, rewinding it. Vic’s shoulders go tense as the scene begins again. “Vic,” Scott says, and the child glances over in unadulterated relief, “go help Mommy and Penny in the kitchen.” He scurries off and Scott swats at Stiles’ knees, urging him to move them. He does, and Scott sits down. “Why are you traumatizing my babies?” he asks, grabbing the remote from Stiles. He clicks off the television.

Stiles sighs deeply. “It’s important that they know that you can never rely on anyone.” He shrugs. “It’s a gentle enough way to learn that lesson. That’s what _The Neverending Story_ is about.”

“That is _not_ what _The Neverending Story_ is about, you shit!” Scott hisses, tossing the remote at Stiles’ chest. “It’s about a story, that… doesn’t end!”

“Well, it’s an appropriate enough instrument, anyway,” Stiles groans and covers his face with a throw pillow. “I’m hungover. How do you two drink like that?”

“Well, Stiles—” Scott begins condescendingly.

“Okay, I know how _you_ drink like that,” he spits, rolling his eyes, “but how does Allison?” He drops his voice. “And doesn’t she have to, like, eastfeed-bray?”

Allison appears in the doorway, platters of pancakes smeared with peanut butter balanced in her hands. She gestures toward their twin five year-olds. “Stiles,” she says, gesturing with the plates toward their twin five year-olds, “please at least Google ‘childhood’ before having kids of your own.”

Scott chuckles and hops up to help her with the plates. “Seriously, dude, don’t you work with kids?”

“Well, yeah, but I don’t _breastfeed_ them!” he hollers into the dining room as the family retreats with breakfast, giggling at his ignorance.

~-~-~

“So,” Scott is saying, as Stiles pokes at his pancakes with a fork, “you’re meeting with Deaton this afternoon?”

“Yeah,” Stiles mumbles wistlessly, flipping over pieces of sticky cake. “He says he realized something, that he wants to talk me out of the plan.”

“Oh yeah?” Allison asks, a mouthful of pancake and peanut butter crushing the words together. “But it seemed like such a good plan.” She looks at him with mock-sympathy, her eyes crinkling with amusement.

Vic tugs on Scott’s shirt sleeve, waiting for him to lean down so he can whisper, “what kind of plan, Daddy?”

“Nothing,” Scott replies, eyes trained on Stiles. “Grown-up stuff. It’s about, uh…”

“It’s about Uncle Stiles’ mortgage,” Allison finishes.

“I _rent_ ,” Stiles hisses, and Allison kicks him under the table. “It’s really not something you need to worry about, kiddo, Uncle Stiles is fine.” He grins sweetly at the children, and Allison nods approvingly.

“C’mon,” Scott claps Stiles on the shoulder. “Deaton’ll be waiting.”

Stiles hauls himself up, clearing his plate. “I know.” He sighs. “Waiting’s going around these days.”

~-~-~

The drive to Deaton’s is quiet and uneventful. Stiles unbuckles his seat belt and Scott tells him to text when he’s done. He nods, and covers his face to shield it from the mid-June drizzle.

He steps into the lobby, and the bell chimes. He flinches.

“Hello, Stiles,” Deaton intones, and Stiles flinches again.

“Hi,” Stiles mouths mirthlessly. He scrubs a hand across his face. “You had something you wanted to run by me?”

“Yes. It’s… of concern.” Deaton gestures toward the back. “Come with me, Stiles.”

Stiles sucks in a deep breath and follows. Deaton has a stack of books, earmarked and spread out on the examination tables.

“Do you remember your first year of training, Stiles?” Deaton asks, flipping through an ancient tome. “When I taught you your first healing spell?”

“Yeah,” Stiles mutters, “vaguely, I guess. You target a part of the body and reverse the injury. It’s basic, especially when the area is small.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Deaton smiles grimly. “You were always a good student.”

“What does this have to do with what we discussed?” Stiles asks impatiently.

“The spell I taught you, the one to erase memories, in case anyone caught a glimpse of a pack member?”

“It’s handy,” Stiles mumbles.

“Let’s not get into that.” Deaton leans over the table, glancing up at Stiles. “That spell uses the same principle, Stiles.”

Stiles looks stunned. “Wait.” He cocks his head. “You’re telling me that memory is _brain damage_?”

“Memory is all kinds of damage, Stiles. But, yes, the reversal of memory is the same process as the healing of any other wound. It reverts to a prior state.”

Stiles hears Penny asking _Why do you keep go-back-ing?_ in the back of his mind. “Okay, I get it. Reverting to a prior state, before the injury. How does this constitute a warning, Deaton?”

Deaton inhales deeply. “When you give it up, you give it _all_ up, Stiles. You sacrifice a packet of time. You _revert_ to a _prior_ state, Stiles.”

Stiles shakes his head. “Stop being cryptic, Deaton. Cards on the table, now.”

Deaton’s eyes soften. “Maybe you’re not such a quick study.” Stiles rolls his eyes. “If you go through with this, your memory of Derek isn’t all you’ll lose. You’ll lose it all, go back to before you met him, become that person, in this new body of yours. As a consequence, you’ll lose all knowledge of your power, and I can’t be sure it can be awakened again.”

Stiles scoffs. “That’s all? I give up Derek and lose a few party tricks? To be honest, that sounds like a fair trade.”

“I can’t be sure there won’t be… _other_ effects, Stiles. You’re too powerful for there not to be, to be honest. There might emerge an… inconsistency.”

“Remember what I said about being cryptic, Deaton?” Stiles leans his elbows on the table as Deaton stands up, stiffens.

“There are forces that might be upset with you if you abandon them.”

Stiles laughs nervously. Deaton does not.

~-~-~

“So, was Deaton convincing?” Scott is asking Stiles as they drive over to the McCall-Stilinski household for dinner.

Stiles is only mildly dreading it. It’ll be good to see the Sheriff again. It’s been too long. “Not entirely. There’s a wrench in it, but I think the machine’s still turning.”

“Well, that’s… a thing,” Scott mumbles quizzically, turning into the driveway. Melissa and the Sheriff are standing on the front stoop, John’s arm wrapped loosely around Melissa’s waist, her arms crossed tightly across her front. Scott turns to Stiles. “Ready for the gauntlet?”

Stiles glances at the looks on the faces peering at him from the stoop. “Not remotely. Take me back to Seattle?”

“Not on your life. Come on, a quick yank, like a bandage.” Scott smiles sweetly, and Stiles wants to hit him. Scott reaches across and cuffs the back of Stiles’ neck, pulls their foreheads together. “This is going to get rough, and then it’s going to get better. That’s the way these things work.”

“Assuming your mother doesn’t plunge a carving knife into my chest in the middle of dinner.”

Scott laughs. “Wow, you really have been gone a long time. It’s not Melissa you should be worrying about, Stiles.”

Stiles turns and looks into the Sheriff’s eyes, watching the creases around his eyes twitching.

“Well, fuck.”

~-~-~

They arrive at the restaurant late for their reservation—the Sheriff having grunted out a brief “we’re going out” upon Stiles’ approach—and sit in the waiting area for another table to become available. The décor is tacky and garish, but the dining room smells like herbs and lemon and garlic and tomato. Stiles’ mouth is watering. His stomach grumbles, and Melissa pats the back of his hand. The Sheriff pulls away from her and walks over to the hostess’ station. He nods and waves the rest of the family over as the hostess collects menus from a maroon leather holder. She waves them grandly toward a tall booth, brass studs flickering across the deep red vinyl.

Melissa scoots in and Stiles follows behind, Scott and John taking their seats across from them. Their server appears with a carafe of ice water and fills their glasses, and John takes a long swig before asking, “So, how’s work?”

Stiles swallows and sets his glass down. “It’s good. I’m on summer vacation right now, and I wasn’t assigned summer school this year, so I think I’ll stay in town for a few weeks. Let myself get used to things after… everything… _happens_.”

John shakes his head briefly. “Let’s not talk about that. This is just dinner. No agendas, no nothing. Just… dinner. With the family.”

Scott smiles broadly. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” he says, playfully slugging John’s shoulder.

Melissa puts her hand on the back of Stiles’ neck. “It has.” She smiles, her eyes crinkling. “Too long.”

“Yeah,” Stiles starts, “sorry about that.” He stares at the floor, dodging the Sheriff’s stare.

“That’s what you’re sorry about?” John begins, but Melissa cuts him off.

“John. We discussed this.”

John raises his hands in defense. “You’re right. We did.”

“So,” Melissa says, turning to Stiles, “tell us about your kids.”

“Not much to say,” Stiles shrugs, crunching into a breadstick. “They’re kids. They’re confused and innocent, and I spend most of my day protecting them from things that adults can deal with half-asleep.”

“Good to hear you have such respect for your charges,” John begins, taking a swig of his water.

“John…” Melissa warns.

Their server breaks the silence, flipping open a pad of paper and smiling broadly. “Hi, I’m Jessica, I’ll be taking care of you this evening. Are we ready to order?”

~-~-~

They eat mostly in silence, with quick flashes of conversation between Scott and Melissa. Stiles and the Sheriff don’t say another word until they pay and wander out to the parking lot.

Stiles wanders toward Scott’s SUV and the Sheriff stops him. “Stiles, you’ll ride with me. Melissa, you don’t mind riding with Scott, do you?”

“Of course not.” Melissa smiles, eyes full of warning.

When they stop at opposite sides of the cruiser, John glances in at the stack of papers in the passenger seat. “Oh, crap. Would you mind sitting in back, son? I’ve got work stuff all over the place up front.”

The Sheriff opens the back passenger door for Stiles and shoos him in. “Did Melissa ride in back on the way here?” he asks, jaw set and eyes suspicious.

“No,” the Sheriff answers, sliding behind the wheel.

“Listen, Dad—”

“Shut up, Stiles.”

“Okay,” he answers, rolling his eyes.

“You know, you’ve got a lot of nerve.”

“I’m guessing you spoke to Deaton.”

John’s eyes flash in the rearview. “I’ll let you know when I’m finished. And yes, but Deaton spoke, and I listened. The question is, did you?” Stiles picks at the fuzzy halo on the nylon seatbelt, feeling the fibers fray under his touch. “You can answer, Stiles.”

“I did listen. I heard him a lot of stuff I already knew, and some stuff I didn’t.”

“And?” John glances impatiently in the rearview.

“And what?”

“Are you still going through with it?” John drums on the steering wheel as he waits on a red light.

“Of course I am!” Stiles exclaims, throwing his hands in the air. “You know what it’s been like, for _years_ , and I have a way out. A break-glass-in-case-of. Well, I’m ready to break the glass.”

“That’s not all you’re gonna break, Stiles.”

Stiles sighs, slumping against the seat. “So you know about the other thing?”

“I do. I know about how you wanna leave us all in the lurch.” John shakes his head. “ _Again_.” The light turns and John turns left, hands slowly drifting across the wheel. “When are you gonna give that Hale boy a fucking break?”

“ _That_ ,” Stiles sputters, “is what I’m _trying_ to _do_ , Dad!”

“Bullshit,” John spits, shaking his head as he pulls into the driveway. “Bullshit that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re running. Just like to ran to Seattle. You—” Stiles hears his father’s voice catch. “You can’t just do that. You’re part of us.” John looks disgusted in the rearview. “You have a _pack_ , son.”

“There’s no pack without an alpha, Dad,” Stiles retorts.

“Yeah, well, whose fucking fault is that?” Stiles glances at the rearview, expecting to see his father’s challenging stare. He does not. John stares off into space as he continues. “Those Hales think you hung the moon, and you hung them out to dry. Peter in London?” John looks into the rearview now, shaking his head at Stiles. “Sending those awful postcards to Lydia?”

“How did you—”

“I’m the Sheriff, son. There’s not a lot that gets by me.” John steels himself. “I’m almost done. And if you go back to Seattle, and see that boy again—that poor, stupid fucking boy—I’ll find hunters way worse than the Argents to send after you.”

Stiles stares down at his hands. They’re shaking. “Dad…”

“Try to be the man I raised you to be, Stiles,” John whispers.

“I am,” Stiles replies weakly.

“Well,” John continues, getting out and unlocking the rear door as he gestures for Stiles to get out with a thumb, “try harder.”

~-~-~

They say goodnight, John embracing Stiles awkwardly, and Scott and Stiles head back to Scott’s car.

“Had a talk with the Sheriff, huh?” Scott asks, gripping Stiles’ shoulder.

Stiles wiggles out of Scott’s grasp. “Let’s talk about literally anything else.”

~-~-~

John sits at the dining room table, swishing a tumbler of whiskey as Melissa kisses him goodnight and starts upstairs to bed. “I’m sorry for how I acted at dinner.”

She stops, her foot halfway between two stairs, and turns, setting her lips in a horizontal crease. “I know. Tomorrow will be better.” She starts back up the stairs, thinks again, and turns back. “That’s all any of us want, to make things better. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” John repeats, finishing his whiskey and fishing his phone out of his pants. He twirls it between his thumb and forefinger, considering, then dials.

Lydia picks up after two rings. “Hello? Mr. Stilinski?”

“Hi, Lydia, I didn’t wake you, did I?” He grimaces, glancing at the clock.

“No, of course not, Derek and I are up late grading finals.”

“Oh, well, don’t let me keep you—”

“It’s fine, Mr. Stilinski, we could use a break.”

John scrubs his hand across the back of his neck. “So Derek’s in the room?” She hums in the affirmative. “Might as well save me a phone call, then. Put me on speakerphone.”

~-~-~

“Well,” Lydia says after she’s hung up the call, “shit.”

“‘Well, shit’ is right,” Derek grunts, staring at the dwindling stacks of exams in front of them.

He sees his hands, smeared with red ink and trembling, and thinks about how it all began with fingers. Fingers grasping flannel and leather. Fingers prying fingers. Fingers drumming on steering wheels and furtively tracing the creases of knuckles underneath the cover of a diner table. Fingers splayed in snow. Fingers swiping at hair. Fingers stopped an inch from either side of a brass doorknob. Fingers dancing above an open mouth like a chandelier, swaying. Fingers burning on a range while spices fill the air. Fingers gripping a jawline, catching a pulse. Fingers digging in for all the thrusting. Fingers grasping fingers. Fingers stopping fingers’ trembling.

Because, in the end, deprivation is how Derek first learned to cower and lick love’s hand, how he was trained to take some small measure of pleasure, even in the dying. It is how he learned that whatever small comfort was offered—whatever thread of affection, however minuscule—would have to suffice. He will make a meal of scraps. He will eat at a burned table among the ruins. He will ask a ghost to pass the wine and he will dance with a lover of smoke while shadows watch from the door. Whatever bastardized, abbreviated love can be brokenly offered him will have to expand to fill the gaps around itself. It will be enough, in the end. Love’s last promise spins on a wire in front of him. He can hardly breathe for the consideration of it.

He chokes out a breath, and nods. He tosses Lydia his keys, and she snatches them out of the air.

“Let’s go?” she asks, eyes twinkling, tongue between her teeth, mouth curled up into a grin.

There’s hardly any breath left in him, but he manages the words nonetheless. “Let’s go.”


	11. The Candle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek and Lydia race toward Beacon Hills, while Stiles' family and friends try to convince him not to go through with the spell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a potential trigger warning for this chapter that I'm putting in the end notes.

“You’re giddy,” Lydia exclaims breathlessly. “Just, I get it, I understand it. I just need a minute to process it. Giddy Derek Hale is a brand-new thing for me. My brain has to make some room.”

Derek laughs, turning to her in the passenger’s seat. He grins and nods. “I guess I am. Really.”

Lydia smiles, flipping the exam booklet in her lap closed. She taps her pen against its cover, places the booklet on the bottom of the stack, turns. “I’m really proud of you, Derek.” She reaches across the console and places her hand on the back of his.

The Camaro swerves to the right at the sudden pressure, and Lydia giggles. “Driving!” Derek scolds, but his eyes are unconvincing. His lips curl up. “It’s really gonna happen, isn’t it? It’s almost over.”

“Yeah,” Lydia says, flipping open another exam, “you’re almost done waiting for each other.”

“Speaking of waiting, you mind driving for a few hours while I finish grading?” Derek drums on the steering wheel. “And then I guess we have to find a coffee shop or something. We’ll need internet access to upload and submit our grades, and the deadline’s tomorrow night.”

Lydia levels an impatient stare at him. “Can you stop pretending to be Mister Practical right now? I mean, it’s not like we’renot driving cross-country in order to rescue the man you love from elemental forces or whatever.” She runs the pad of one finger across the smooth surface of a fingernail, bringing her hand closer to her face to inspect it. “Besides, that’s not the only deadline that’s tomorrow night.”

“I know that,” Derek says plainly, shrugging. “And he’s the elemental force. Not quite a real rescue in that case.”

Lydia scoffs. “Believe me, Derek, you can rescue someone from himself.”

~-~-~

Melissa knocks lightly, and Stiles turns from the dusty leatherbound tome in front of him.

“Oh, hi.” She gestures toward his bed and he assents with a nod. He swivels toward her as she sits. “Is everything okay?”

She wrings her hands against her thigh, then smoothes the creases there. “I actually wanted to make sure everything was okay with you. This isn’t ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board,’ Stiles. There’s real juice here. I just wanna make sure you’re ready,” she sighs and Stiles can see her spine stiffen, “for whatever happens.”

Stiles scrubs a hand across the back of his neck and Melissa smiles without realizing it, recognizing John in the gesture. “I mean, I’m not sure?” He swallows, turning back to the book. “I’m definitely as ready for this as I am for whatever happens if things continue like they have been. I think there was a time when this would’ve been a mistake, but I’m past that.” Stiles stares at the floor. “It’s been weeks since I’ve dreamed about him. I think that means something.”

Melissa nods, considering. “I just don’t wanna see you hurt.”

Stiles stands, and Melissa wonders when he got so tall. He sits next to her, kissing her on the cheek. “You can see me right now. I’m hurt.” She opens her mouth to reply, then stops, pulling him into a hug. He’s grateful for the closeness and for the angle as he wipes away a tear over her shoulder. “This is gonna be the end of that.” His voice cracks like static.

~-~-~

Lydia sits across from Derek, poking at a Caesar salad. “Give me a fry.” She holds out a manicured hand, smiling sweetly. “This salad is the most bullshit salad I have ever had.”

Derek scoffs. “Well, that’s what you get for ordering a salad at a highway diner.” Their server glares from across the dining room, and he mouths _I’m sorry_ at her as he sheepishly piles fries onto a side plate. He slides the plate across the sticky table.

“Thank you,” Lydia intones, picking up a fry. “I’m glad I didn’t have to beg. I don’t think this place even has a jukebox.”

Derek groans, chuckling at the memory.

~-~-~

“Your elbow is ruining my ribs,” Derek complained as Isaac tried to compress himself into the smallest size possible in the corner of their booth. On his right side, Stiles dug his sneakers into the linoleum floor, trying to keep from sliding out of the booth entirely. Lydia and Allison giggled from across the booth, where they were seated on Jackson’s and Scott’s laps, respectively.

“Yeah? Well, your entire torso is ruining my entire _life_ ,” Isaac replied, groaning as Derek scooted in closer. His face screwed up in pain as their server brought their meals, setting down a black wooden stand with nylon webbing.

“You know, we can pull up a chair or move you to a table, seeing as you have seven people in a four-person booth right now,” the server said with a tone suggesting that she could only be less amused with the aid of some sort of medical intervention.

“We’re fine,” Derek replied, yanking his plate away from Stiles’ grabby hands. He shook his head, mouthing _no_ at his sulking boyfriend. Derek scooted closer to Isaac, extending a thick arm at Stiles’ chest to keep him away from his fries. Isaac protested, climbing under the table and crawling out from under the end. He disappeared and returned a moment later with a chair, sitting at the end of the booth. “Oh, thanks, I wasn’t gonna ask you to move, but—” Isaac flipped him off and Derek reached out with his left hand, gesturing as if he were catching it and tucking it into his pocket.

Stiles stilled against Derek’s hand, pouting and leaning in as he withdrew. Derek eyed him warily as he kissed the edge of his jaw. Stiles’ hand crept across the vinyl seat before pouncing on Derek’s plate. Derek gripped his wrist and shot him a disbelieving look.

“You could’ve ordered your own fries, Stiles,” Derek said, loosening his grip just to the point that Stiles began to try wriggling out of it, then clamping down ever-so-slightly.

“You can have my fries!” Scott offered brightly from across the table, rotating his plate to allow for better access.

Stiles pouted. “Thanks for being a bro, Scott, but I don’t want _your_ fries. I want _Derek’s_.” His eyes shot malice as Derek relaxed slightly and he began to squirm again. His shoulders went limp as he stopped abruptly. “I need to use the _restroom_ , Derek, could you please _release_ me?”

Derek began to scoot out of the booth, and Stiles rolled his eyes as he recognized what he was doing. Once they were both standing, Derek released Stiles’ wrists, immediately shifting toward the table to body-block him. He almost wound up in Isaac’s lap, and his curls shook everywhere as he shouted, “Fucking _seriously_?”

Stiles slumped toward the bathroom, and Derek victoriously took his seat again, smirking smugly.

After a minute of silence, Scott whispered, “Derek, that was _cold_.”

“Yeah,” Lydia agreed. “Jackson here is basically the world’s hugest asshole, and even he wouldn’t deny me _french fries_.” She demonstrated by daintily plucking one off his plate and popping it into her mouth. She and Jackson nodded condescendingly across the table. Allison grinned, suppressing the chuckle forming under her dimples.

Derek rolled his eyes as Stiles returned to the booth, sitting as far away from him as possible without technically being seated at another table. Allison hopped off Scott’s lap, stepping over to the jukebox in the corner by the bathrooms.

Stiles’ eyes lit up when he recognized the guitar intro. Not missing a beat, he sang, “ _Good times, for a change. See, the luck I’ve had can make a good man turn bad_.” Derek rolled his eyes as Stiles continued. “ _So please, please, please, let me, let me, let me, let me get what I want this time._ ” He crooned soulfully, a smirk edging up the corners of his mouth as he edged closer to Derek and, by extension, his plate of fries. “ _Haven’t had a dream in a long ti_ —” Stiles began but Derek interrupted him by pouncing, pinning him to the vinyl seat. As he went down, Stiles flailed, knocking Isaac’s bowl of chili into his lap. They both looked up at him simultaneously.

“Pack is bullshit. I’m walking home,” Isaac seethed, storming out.

All six of them at the table cracked up, Derek kissing the corner of Stiles’ mouth and mumbling, “You have a nice voice, Stiles.”

Stiles thanked him and kissed him deeply, only separating their lips to stuff the handful of fries he had snatched into his grinning mouth. “Victory,” he whispered against Derek’s ear. Derek could feel his salty lips grinning against his cheek.

~-~-~

Stiles steps into Deaton’s office, knocking briefly as the older man waves him in with one hand, the other stitching up a large gash in a dog’s side.

“Hello, Stiles,” he breathes compassionately. “Did you give any thought to what I told you the other day?”

Stiles sighs, stepping forward. “I did. I just had a few questions, if you have time.”

Deaton sets down the suture kit and turns toward him. “Of course, have a seat.”

Stiles eyes the wounded animal and pulls a stool over. The rubber grinds terribly against the concrete floor. “I keep seeing spells that allow someone to take another person’s memories, but I don’t see a way to use it on myself. What am I missing here?”

“I have to ask, one more time. You’re sure that you want to do this?” Stiles nods and Deaton continues. “You need a focus. An object of some sort, to project the memories into, that you can then use to release them. Once that happens, they won’t be your problem anymore.”

Stiles considers, watching the dog’s chest rising and falling as its anesthesia hums. “What kind of object?”

“It’s up to you. It can be something easily destroyed or small, something you won’t miss. I’ve heard of people demolishing houses or blowing out candles. The object isn’t important. What’s important is binding the memories to something and then releasing them.”

Stiles starts to stand, saying, “Thanks,” but Deaton waves to his seat again.

“There’s one more limitation. The spell will be more complete if you complete the binding at a relevant site for the memory. Since you already need a ley line to tap into, I think you know what that means.”

“So,” Stiles says, nodding, “the Hale house it is.”

~-~-~

“This place is creepy,” Lydia whispers as they approach the door to the motel’s lobby.

“I’ll protect you,” Derek says, rolling his eyes. “Besides, it’s the only place with wifi for miles. We’ll check in, upload our grades, get a few hours of sleep, and be back on the road with plenty of time to spare.”

Lydia seems unsure as Derek slips through the door, setting off an obnoxious chime. They approach the desk and both start when a body unbends behind it, looming over them with a grin. The clerk is tall, with ear-length black hair that’s stringy and flat. His nose juts out at a swooping low angle that gives it the appearance of a beak.

“Welcome to the Timber Lodge,” he says grandly, smiling. “How may I be of service?”

“We, uh, need a room,” Derek starts, digging his wallet out of his pocket. “Name’s Derek Hale. I called ahead.”

The clerk holds up a finger then leans down to retrieve an ancient appointment book. He drops it on the counter with a loud thump and flips it open. “Ah, yes, Hale, two single rooms?”

Derek’s eyebrows twitch. “I think we were down for one room with two beds?”

The clerk waves his hand. “Oh, we don’t have any of those. My brother probably just heard ‘two beds’ and put you down for two rooms.” When Derek starts to reply, the clerk interrupts him. “If it’s a financial question, I promise that our rates are quite reasonable.”

Derek turns to Lydia. She rolls her eyes, but nods. “So much for protecting me, I guess,” she says, turning to the clerk. “Two adjacent rooms will be fine.” She nudges Derek’s side and whispers, “I think I stand a better chance on my own, anyway. You’ve gone soft lately.”

The clerk disappears behind the desk again and two identical people stand up. “Follow us,” he says, as each of them extend a card key. Derek and Lydia each take one, hauling their bags up as they follow the pair down the hallway.

“I’m surprised you didn’t say that in unison,” Derek says, chuckling, and Lydia elbows him in the ribs.

“Not that kind of hotel,” the other clerk replies, grinning. “Here are your rooms. Let us know if we can do anything to be of service.”

~-~-~

Lydia runs into Derek in the hallway a few minutes later, each of them poised with an ice bucket and plastic bag. “After you,” Lydia offers, bowing deeply in a vaudevillian display of courtesy.

Derek chuckles through his teeth as he scoops ice and says, “So, we have to make it an early day if we’re gonna make it to Beacon Hills in time. Are you alright with an early morning?”

Lydia retrieves her ice and shrugs. “Yeah, I guess so. I was just planning on submitting grades and making it an early night.” She stands in the doorway to her room, fishing a cigarette out of her purse. “I mean, I was gonna jerk off later, but that doesn’t really count as ‘plans,’ per se.”

At the end of the hall, one of the clerks turns on his heel and comes back from where he came. Lydia laughs as she bids Derek goodnight, latching the door behind her. She fishes her laptop out of her bag, opening it and connecting to the wifi. It’s slow, but she’s eventually able to submit her grades, checking her university account for the confirmation email before closing her laptop and lighting another cigarette. She slides the laptop back into her bag, her fingers playing along the edge of the rubber-banded stack of postcards at the bottom.

She sighs and extracts them, flipping through them. The oldest ones are faded and worn, well-loved. They’re in chronological order, growing less and less urgent as time passed. Each “love you” turned into a “miss you,” each “sorry for” turned into a “sorry that.” She sighs and drags on her cigarette, setting it in the ashtray on the desk. She arrives at her least favorite point in the stack, the gap when she realized the truth about Jackson, and who was sending the postcards. She had torn up six months’ worth when she realized, tossing them into her fireplace, and a few minutes later had gasped back into the living room to retrieve whatever pieces could be saved. She pours a Scotch and traces one of the counterfeit J’s in black ink on the back of a photo of the Rialto Bridge.

She only catches her breath when she hears a familiar knock. She remembers sitting in her room and hearing it on a windowpane. Three sharp taps, the pacing of which is strung between confidence and laziness. She doesn’t breathe until she can hear the voice.

“Lydia?”

“You’re not him,” she calls out, voice shaking. “He’s dead.”

“Don’t be like that, Lydia, just let me in.”

She stubs out her cigarette, clearing the smoke, and approaches the door. Her hand closes around the handle. _Quick, like a bandage_ , she tells herself, and pulls it open. Her breath lays low and heavy in her chest. “Jackson.”

~-~-~

Scott pulls the SUV into the driveway, Allison soothing the kids in the backseat, Stiles flipping through notes in the passenger seat. “So,” he says, turning to his right, “this time tomorrow night, huh?”

“Yeah,” Stiles grunts. “This time tomorrow night.”

Allison strokes Penny’s hair. “It’s the end of an era. Or, actually, the beginning of that same era.” Scott chuckles. “Technically speaking.” Allison smiles, her dimples flashing in the rearview.

Stiles unbuckles his seatbelt but doesn’t get out of the car. “You two aren’t going to try to talk me out of it?”

Allison glances at Scott through the rearview. Scott breathes deeply. “No, we’re not. We talked about it, and it’s not our place. Not that the Sheriff didn’t lobby us.”

Stiles laughs. “Yeah, he’s been doing that. Your mom talked to me about it today. His fingerprints were all over that.”

“Dude,” Scott protests, “don’t talk about your dad’s fingerprints on my mom.” Allison stifles laughter, cooing at Vic when he stirs next to her. “Well,” Scott starts after a minute, “we have to get the pups to bed. I’m guessing you’re not going back to Casa Stilinski to sleep tonight?” Stiles nods. “Guest bedroom’s all yours.”

Stiles sits in the car for a few minutes, then clicks off the overhead light and gathers his notes. He picks up his bag, dragging his feet over to the Jeep, sliding into the driver’s side and reclining until the sky is in a ragged canvas frame above him. The stars blink bitterly. He pulls his knees up and leans his head against the seat. In the blue light of late evening, words from an age ago clamber into his mind. He remembers Derek drinking coffee and reading off a piece of Kunitz:

“Pet, spitfire, blue-eyed pony,

here is a new note

I want to pin on your door,

though I am ten years late

and you are nowhere:

Tell me,

are you still mistress of the valley,

what trophies drift downriver,

why did you keep me waiting?”

Stiles feels a chill on his damp cheeks as the edges of his memory blur. He can’t remember his own reply. Instead, he tilts his head toward the vicious mortal stars and asks no one, “Why did I keep you waiting?”

~-~-~

Beacon Hills is still and quiet. There is nothing in the sky, not even the loping formlessness of a cloud.

Derek parks the Camaro outside the Hale house, a pit in his stomach as his childhood home loomed ahead. Burned, then rebuilt, and subsequently abandoned.

Lydia pats his knee. “You nervous?”

Derek nods, breath shaky. “Yeah. It’s not just the who, it’s the where.”

She smiles and takes her face between his hands. “Remember what we talked about? This is good. This is what you need to do.” She pauses for a second, mouth curling as she swallows hard. “This is what you owe him, Derek.”

“I know. I’m gonna go in. I just need a minute.” He closes his eyes and takes in the evening chill. _This is what I owe him_.

Lydia checks her phone, the brief glow illuminating the inside of the car. “Don’t wait too long. It’s ten minutes to midnight, Derek.” Lydia can hear the door slam before she even has a chance to turn.

Derek’s hands are shaking but his feet are steady. He scales the porch, creaks open the front door, and pokes his head inside.

“Deaton?” Stiles calls out as he turns the corner into the foyer. “You’re late.” The breath catches in his chest as Derek thrusts his hands into his pockets. “I thought you were someone else,” he says after a long pause. “If I’d known it was you, I would’ve said that you’re _very_ late.”

“Stiles…” Derek starts, taking a step toward him. “You weren’t a mistake.”

Stiles stiffens. “Derek, just let me do this. Just let me go. We try and we try and we keep trying. The more I think about it, the more it seems like trying is just a worse kind of waiting. This has to be done. _I_ have to be done.” Stiles swallows and stares, a challenging look on his face. His shoulders slump after a moment, relaxing when Derek doesn’t step forward.

“Is that what you want? To give up? To be done? Is that what your email was about?”

“Maybe I changed my mind since then,” Stiles says, rolling a tall white candle between his hands, nimble fingers playing at the wick.

Derek takes a catalogue of his cells, the lengthy membranes of his muscles tense and aching. Muscles holding other muscles back, forcing him to stand still. He can feel the fluid frothing in his spine. He can taste copper. “Stiles…” he begins, but cannot continue because there he is, in front of him, his mouth slightly open. The candle rolls across the hardwood as Stiles takes Derek’s hands in his, gripping until they’re so numb that neither of them can tell whose fingers are whose.

Derek leans against him, his chin fitting into the crease of his neck. “You’ve got good timing for once,” Stiles says. “I almost lit that damn thing.” Derek closes his eyes as he hears Stiles’ voice, huskier and more tired than the last time, in a singing whisper: “ _So for once in my life let me get what I want. Lord knows it would be the first t—_ ”

~-~-~

The morning is thick and heavy in Derek’s mouth as a pounding on the door awakens him. He turns away from the door, a warm mass against his back. Dust dances in the light slanting in through the shaded window. He feels a hand curl around his chest.

A familiar voice whispers, “Derek?”

He closes his eyes and lets himself wish, that it was him, that there’s no mistake. He turns and breathes heavily, a smile pulling at his lips as his eyes take in the amber of Stiles’. “Stiles… is it… is it you?”

Stiles smiles, eyes flickering with warmth. “No.” A pitying look crosses his face. “It’s not.” His features flicker, eyes gone grey and blue and black, hair shortening and lengthening and changing color and texture, skin lightening and darkening and gaining and losing moles and little flecks of hair.

Derek pulls back as the banging on the door continues. He can hear Lydia’s voice. “Who are you? _What_ are you?”

Sympathetic lips in a million shapes curl into hundreds of consecutive smiles. “Anybody you want. You don’t remember?”

Last night comes back in a throbbing wave. A knock on the door. An embarrassed look. A shy “you gonna let me in?”

“We talked for hours. Though, to be fair, you didn’t really have to tell me anything. You wolves,” a blurring shining finger strokes Derek’s clavicle under his shirt, “you ring like bells.”

“So this is what you do for fun?” Derek asks, stalking over to the door, the creature standing up and blocking his way with shoulders impossibly broad. “You find sad sacks like me to fuck?”

The creature extends its fingers toward Derek’s cheek, losing its smile, its prismatic eyes going soft. “We didn’t do anything. That’s not what you needed, Derek.”

“What I needed?” Derek asks, his face curling in disgust.

“Last night you stumbled over your words, you were quick to become defensive, you were stone.” The creature gestures toward his bags, packed neatly in the corner with his shoes on top. “Tonight you’ll be water.”

“This was…?”

“You don’t know how to get out of it until you’re in it, Mr. Hale.” The creature straightens its back, walking to the door and opening it abruptly. Lydia falls through.

“Derek! It’s _ten_!” Her eyes are wide and panicked.

The creature and its twin fill their arms with bags, filing out to the parking lot and shoving them into the trunk of the Camaro. “Good luck, Mr. Hale!” one of them cries out, “Happy to be of service!”

As they put the Timber Lodge in their rearview, Derek turns to Lydia and asks, “Weird night?”

“Let’s not talk about the incubus thing,” Lydia replies, staring out the window, “ever.”

Derek grinds down on the gas. He and Lydia don't speak the rest of the way to Beacon Hills.

~-~-~

The night arches out over the preserve as Derek pulls the Camaro to a stop. A small crowd is gathered outside the house, cars parked in an asymmetrical semicircle near the front porch.

Melissa steps forward as Derek gets out of the car, putting her hand on his shoulder. Derek softens at the touch and he starts to speak when Lydia emerges from the car. “Is he in there?” she asks, pointing toward the house before pulling her coat around her shoulders to ward off the chilling wind.

“He is,” Deaton replies, “but the house has been locked down for hours. Some kind of warding spell. I wouldn’t waste any time. He could complete the binding any minute.”

Derek nods and starts toward the house, feeling a familiar pull in his gut. “Stiles?” he calls out, ascending the stairs, feeling a lifetime of tragedy creaking below his feet.

“Derek,” he hears a weak whisper behind the door, “I fucked up.”

He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the cold wood, wind shearing through his hair. “It’s so good to hear your voice,” he says, laughing and crying all at once. “Let me in and we’ll fix it?”

“Don’t be mad?” Stiles asks, leaning away from the door.

“Promise.” Derek takes in a deep breath as Stiles opens the door. “It’s good to see you,” Derek says, eyes crinkling up around the edges.

Stiles’ face softens, but it’s still grim. “Derek,” he breathes out. “It’s good to see you, too.”

Derek takes a step toward the door but can’t cross the threshold. He pulls his jacket tighter around him. “Can I come in? We need to talk. And touch.” He laughs, rolling his eyes at himself. He’s incredulous at this winged thing pounding in his chest. “I need to touch you again. It’s been too long.”

“Derek,” Stiles whispers, disappearing for a moment before returning with a thick white candle, its wick a dancing glimmer of flame. He looks away sheepishly, his voice a hoarse croak. “I told you I fucked up. I—”

Derek doesn’t hear anything else. His head fills with static. Darkness blurs the edges of his vision. “Why?” he interrupts.

Stiles sets the candle down on the side table. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

Derek lays his forehead against the barrier, sparks dancing across his face. Stiles reaches through, fingers pressing against Derek’s illuminated face, and pulls him through the barrier. Derek looks up at Stiles expectantly for a moment before reaching out and pulling him close. He smells like sweat and smoke and herbs, and his flannel grips at Derek’s stubble insistently. “I never thought I would see you again,” he whimpers, eyes trained on the candle as Stiles wraps his arms around him.

“I’m glad you were wrong,” Stiles says, leading Derek upstairs.

~-~-~

Derek feels a low ache in his chest as Stiles pushes him up against the bedroom door. He growls and feels a sheaf of flannel in his fist as they stumble toward the bed. Stiles’ eyes are large and unfocused as he undresses Derek, sucking on whatever flesh appears before him.

“Stiles, wait.” Derek places his hand on Stiles’ chest. “Slow down.”

Stiles grabs his hand by the wrist, sucking each finger. “Can’t go slow. Don’t have much time.”

Stiles shakes his head, unbuckling Derek’s belt, straddling him, urgent desperate kisses trailing across his neck and chest. “Stiles!” Derek takes a deep breath. “What happens when the candle goes out?”

Stiles stops, considering. He looks up at Derek, letting go of the cuffs of his jeans. “You know what happens, Derek. Deaton told you. Or the Sheriff. Somebody did. You know what it means.”

Derek leans forward, grasping Stiles’ chin with two fingers. “I need you to tell me.”

“When the candle goes out, it’s over. The spell is finished.”

“So… that’s the rush, then?”

Stiles nods. “That’s the rush.” His shoulders sag as he leans into the older man. “I’m sorry. You can leave if you want.” He looks up as Derek brushes his hair from his eyes. “This can’t be easy for you.”

Derek shakes his head. “I don’t want to leave. I want to stay. And I want you to stay, too.” His voice is a low tremor. “Do you think it’ll be easier if we don’t do this?” He gestures toward the bed, arms weak from exhaustion.

“I don’t know. Do you not wanna do this?” Derek surges up against Stiles, kicking his jeans off, pulling him onto the bed. He unbuckles Stiles’ pants, gnawing at his lips, and reaches down to fuck himself open on two fingers. “I’ll take that as a no,” Stiles says, grinning against Derek’s mouth as he follows the length of Derek’s fingers with his cock. Derek laughs, pulling Stiles closer, then lets out a hissing groan as he feels his blunt tip pressing inside. They stay still for a moment, before Stiles breaks the silence: “Let me know when you’re ready for more, man.”

Derek closes his eyes, looking away from Stiles’ eager face. So different than he had ever been before, so unembarrassed by pleasure. “It’ll never be enough,” he chokes out, kissing him greedily, then breaking the kiss to whisper in his ear, “so it might as well be now.” He gasps as he feels Stiles pressing deeper inside. Wrapping his legs around his narrow waist, he cries out in pleasure.

Stiles leans down, kissing his ear, his cheek, his neck, his shoulder. “God, I love you,” he moans as he thrusts.

Derek grips his shoulder blades, rolling his hips to greet each thrust. “I love you too, Stiles,” he whispers, face stricken.

~-~-~

Derek awakens, feeling warm morning light against his cheeks. He stretches lazily, feeling his back popping as the damp sheets cling to his body. He lays there for a moment, enjoying the first breaths of morning before he reaches across the bed. He sits up when he feels no one there, heart prone in his chest.

Across the room is Stiles, curled up and half-hiding behind the door. His eyes are wide and his breath is shallow.

“Who are you?” he asks, pulling his knees closer to his chest. “And what is this place?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's incubus-related dubcon in this chapter (though no actual sex with incubi, just deception by incubi).
> 
> Also, the song that Stiles sings in the flashback is "Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want" by the Smiths and the Kunitz quotation in this chapter is from "After the Last Dynasty."


	12. Freedom, Or Whatever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The morning after.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a brief description of vomiting in this chapter, which I thought was worth warning about.

The January air was like a fist gripping. Derek stood on the edges of the gathering, watching the sloshing of the supermarket beer and the bottles of whiskey, cheap amber with lavender petals floating within like feathers. His boots pressed the fine layer of powder beneath him into glassy ice.

“Hey! Sourwolf!” Stiles called, leaning against Scott, who was, in turn, leaning against Allison, who was leaning on no one. “Join the festivities! It’s America’s half-birthday!” He wagged his eyebrows and swung the can of beer at the end of his arm in a wide arc, froth spilling down his wrist.

Derek rolled his eyes and pulled long and smoky from his bottle of whiskey as he leaned against the bumper of the Jeep. “Nah.” He grinned around the mouth of the bottle as Stiles scoffed.

Isaac and Danny were somewhere, singing a piss-poor round of “God Bless America.” Lydia was straddling Jackson’s lap on the porch, kissing a trail down his neck when the sky above The Preserve broke its inky, patient silence. An illumination! All heads turned!

Sparks floated from sparklers and fountains, hissing and fizzling across the snow. All that plasma throbbing like a wound. As if the earth itself could be a mirror, reflecting the humming of the constellations above. And the sky had been a mirror shattering, sparks arcing up toward nowhere and away and exploding in a chorus before their bewildered, shadow-lengthened faces.

Scott had replaced his beer with a sparkler and was waving it like a fencing foil. He drew jagged, temporary Zs in a mock-Zorro routine until it went sputtering and then dark.

Their bodies flattened into dark shapes momentarily before being reilluminated as a new pair of sparklers emerged. The shadow of the ridges of Stiles’ lips darted across his face as he and Scott continued to spar. Scott dodged and parried with surprising grace, and Stiles was about to wind up with a singed flannel.

Scott dropped to one knee with a dramatic thrust of his sparkler, catching Stiles square in the chest. He flapped his hands pitifully at his chest, pawing at the throbbing embers before tearing at the fabric and stumbling backward. His torso swayed, arms caught backward in the sleeves of his flannel, stretched behind him like ill-formed wings, and he began to tumble backward. As he fell in a twisting arc, Stiles watched the earth rushing up toward him, until it was interrupted by a Scott’s sparkler choking out at the same time that a plume of neon sparks edged into his peripheral vision.

Derek was off the Jeep’s fender, darting through the shadows and tackling Stiles, yanking him off to the side of the fountain. Stiles looked up at him, stunned, his mouth opening and closing but finding no purchase for words. “You, uh… you…”

But Derek was already standing up and dusting himself off as the fountain dwindled and the Jeep rocked on its chassis. “Mind your distance,” he tossed over his shoulder, “you don’t wanna get burned.”

~-~-~

Derek feels something in his chest unlatching as Stiles repeats the question: “Who are you? And what is this place?”

He sits up, pulling the sheets tight around his chest. He closes his eyes and it smells like nothing has changed. “Uh, I… don’t know how to answer that question.”

“Start by trying harder than that. What’s your name?”

Derek’s stomach churns. “It’s Derek.”

“Okay, Derek. I’d say it’s nice to meet you, but—”

And Derek is gone, a flash of sheet fluttering to the floor. He slams open the door, stumbles down the hallway to the bathroom, presses through the door, vomits in the dark. He kicks the door shut, curled on the floor, unfurling toilet paper like a white flag. He leans his forehead against the cool tile and takes a deep breath, the acrid smell of bile creeping up into his nose. He flushes the toilet and hears a quiet knocking at the door.

“Derek?” Stiles asks, voice small and shaking. “Do you know what happened last night?”

“Vaguely,” Derek answers, rolling over onto his back, closing his eyes against the light creeping in through the slowly opening door.

~-~-~

Derek and Stiles were alone, but alone together. The bonfire spit sparks and illuminated their shivering bodies huddling, their hands clenching each others’ under the leather jacket laid across their laps.

“You’re warm,” Stiles giggled, pressing his shoulder into Derek’s chest.

“Good thing,” Derek replied, sipping from a bottle of wolfsbane-laced whiskey, “otherwise I’d be freezing.”

Stiles rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you would be cold if you weren’t warm. What an insight.” Suddenly, Stiles was on the ground, looking up at Derek, stunned. “Rude!” he exclaimed, reaching up for him, fingers twitching, a comically exaggerated scowl pressing across his face.

“You should really do something about that clumsiness.” Derek grinned around the neck of the whiskey bottle.

“You should really do something about those rabbit teeth, but I don’t assault you for it,” Stiles replied, scooting next to Derek on the log. He curled his arms around Derek’s waist, slipping fingers through the belt loops on his hip.

Derek slowly leaned toward Stiles, a smile crossing his face. “You like my rabbit teeth,” he said, the curve of his lips closing in on Stiles’.

Stiles kissed him back, firm and slow. “You like my clumsiness.”

Isaac flopped down next to them. “This sucks,” he said, head lolling, throwing his arm over Stiles’ shoulder, “everybody’s hooking up but me. We should call this Codependence Day.”

Derek and Stiles laughed, fingers twisting around one another’s, while Isaac looked on, bewildered.

~-~-~

“How much did I have to drink last night? I don’t remember a thing and my head is killing me.”

Derek opens his eyes. Stiles stands in the doorway, light framing the grimace crossing his face. The hallway is illuminated as if by sparks. “I don’t think you drank anything last night.”

“What, no whiskey dick?” Stiles laughs, and suddenly the sound of the small dark room is illuminated as if by sparks. Something unlatches in Derek’s chest at the sound.

Derek smiles. “Definitely not.” His face closes in on itself, considering, remembering: _This is not who he appears to be._ “You were…” He scrubs a hand across his face, dragging a towel from the rack across from the toilet, covering himself. “You were perfect.”

Stiles laughs. It sounds like a homecoming parade. “I’ll admit, I peeked before you woke up. Congratulations on,” he says, blushing and gesturing at Derek’s whole person, “all of that.” He smiles, sitting cross-legged next to Derek in the dark, unencumbered by embarrassment at his nudity. “You’re one of those once-in-a-lifetime lays, aren’t you?” Stiles asks, then, after a moment, grins broadly and raises his hand for a triumphant high-five.

Derek doesn’t accept it. His face falls further in the dark.

~-~-~

The burnt-out fountains left craters in the snow covering the surface of the preserve, like the pock-marks on the face of the broad and pitiless moon. And then that whole night, that whole world, was lips searching the magma shadows of the bonfire.

Every so often the other wolves would catch a spare pheromone, a sheer gasp in the cold air, and would whistle, or cheer. Lydia looked up from where she was leaning over Jackson, administering slow kisses, and she asked, “What is it?”

~-~-~

“Do you want a ride home?” Derek asks, stirring coffee in his boxer-briefs. “I could take you home, make sure you get there safe. Or I can call your dad, have him come get you?” He eyes the end table, the pathetic little stump of candle fused to the wood. He sighs. “It’s up to you.”

“Are you, like, mad at me, or something?” Stiles lifts his mug to his lips, reveres the warm liquid, grips it like armor. He takes a deep breath. “Because, I mean, I guess I understand if this was a one-time sort of thing.” He smiles bitterly and presses on. “But I’m not sure it should be, you know? We could go see a movie. I like movies—most people do. Like movies, I mean. They’re great. So we could go to one, at some point, if you’d like. But not if you don’t want to. Movies aren’t obligatory. Not required.” He releases a small sparkling cascade of laughter, then it chokes off, leaving silence. “You gotta give me something, here. I don’t have a lot of sex, and you… _do_. It would logically follow, I mean, just, like, look at you. So I’m not so good at the whole… _morning-after_ thing. So if you could, like, meet me halfway here, I would totally appreciate it. Big appreciation from me, on… the whole… meeting halfway… thing…”

Derek stares at the floor, hears the toast springing, breathes deep. “So, should I call for your ride or something?”

Stiles’ face falls. “Oh.” He nods, a forced smile smeared across his bobbing head. “So this was a one-time thing. Okay.” He begins to button up his shirt, lips quaking as his smile cracks. “First and last. Got it.” Stiles’ face is heartbreakingly hopeful. “I mean, I assume I’d know if it weren’t the first time. The way you’re looking at me, I don’t think I could not know that. I don’t think I’d want to.” Derek flinches and Stiles nods in silent understanding. “It’s okay, though. I get it.”

Derek starts toward him as he turns. He imagines taking him by the shoulder, holding him, breathing in his atmosphere one last time. He imagines _deus ex machina_ , Mnemosyne descending to return that which has been taken. He imagines the _telos_ without a trial. But when his fingers touch the soft cloth of Stiles’ shirt, they do not hold. There is no purchase.

“I guess I’ll just wait outside,” Stiles mutters, halfheartedly, as if to no one.

Derek locks the door behind him and slumps against it. He can hear Stiles arranging his long limbs on the porch steps. He can hear him huffing, the quiet thrumming of his phone, the “Dad?” that folds into this newest loss of him. He feels punctured. He lays his forehead on his knees and catches a glimpse of the white puddle of wax on the floor. His eyes widen.

He can hear Stiles jump outside as he clambers over to the end table, almost knocking it over as he inspects the stump of candle. _Maybe_ , he thinks, eyebrows furrowing as he scans the room. He eyes a book of matches on the floor next to a narrow envelope, seizing them both, holding the matches aloft in triumph. _Fucking maybe._

The match bursts into life, a brief orange shadow quivering behind Derek’s hand. He holds his breath, transferring the flickering flame to the little stump of wick. He closes his eyes and inhales, willing the candle to light, to be renewed, to give him back what has been taken.

He opens his eyes at the urgent pounding on the front door, all breath taken from him.

~-~-~

Lydia was pouring herself another beer, the keg sputtering foam into a red plastic cup. “Okay, okay, everybody, shut up, shut up.” The drunken revelers calmed, lifting their glasses as Lydia continued. “It looks like our lost little lambs finally got their shit together,” she announced, to a round of rolling eyes and hoots. “To the lovebirds!”

Stiles blushed, curling in closer to Derek. He was barely able to keep the sly smile from his lips.

Derek leaned in, his nose pressing in against Stiles’ cheek, his lips pressing in. The din faded away as their lips met, replaced by the circling thump of their heartbeats. As their lips came apart, they heard the scene come back into focus: indistinct whistling, Jackson shouting “Get a room!”

Scott slurred, leaning against Allison’s shoulder, “You two are gonna be so fucking happy.”

~-~-~

Stiles stands in the doorway, his face unbuckling and open. “Tell me your last name.”

“What?” Derek asks, his eyes glancing over to the candle, turning over the envelope in his hands. The matches lie forgotten on the floor.

“Your last name. It’s Hale. You’re Derek _Hale_.” Stiles says the words slowly, absorbing the information even as he transmits it.

“I am,” Derek says, nodding, his face barely chancing a smile. “Do you… know me?”

Stiles continues, his eyes turned up as he holds back tears. “That means that this… this is the Hale house. The house that burned.”

Derek nods, only half-understanding, his hands clenching at his sides. “Yeah. It is.”

“My dad told me about your family when I was little,” Stiles says, compassion softening his features. “I only recognized the place from outside. It must’ve been so hard for you to come back here.”

Derek stares off to the side, catching a glimpse of the candle, which sputters out uselessly. “Yeah. It was.”

Stiles looks at him as if the grief he expects Derek to feel can somehow osmose into him, eyes watering. He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, then Derek closes the distance between them, resting his hand on Stiles’ shoulder, veins blackening under his shirt, repatriating the ache that Stiles feels. He pulls him close, the envelope crinkling against Stiles’ shirt.

Stiles swallows after a while swimming in that moment, unburdened, and says, “You have warm hands for a ghost.”

And then Stiles is gone, the door swinging open in the early morning breeze. Derek opens the envelope, hands shaking.

~-~-~

Derek,

I fantasize about you not reading this. I fantasize about it so much that I almost didn’t write it. Because I know what it means for you to be reading this. I know this kind of failure well. But, I did write this, obviously, and here we are.

Do you remember that night in January of my senior year? There was some freak storm, and we went out into The Preserve to play in the snow and wound up drinking and setting off fireworks? You remember. I’ve seen you remember. I know the shape of your face, remembering.

How we were young and stupid. How we were indiscreet, revealed to the others under the quiet of the moon. And how they smiled and handed me another beer. How liberating, to be rid of our secrets!

That is the whole story, and it’s the story we can’t bear to tell ourselves. We were hubris. Love was the pathology we clung to, dangling beyond logic, our toes inches from the coals.

If you’re reading this, I might as well admit it: I was going to give you the gift that I gave myself. I wanted to save us both from ourselves. That’s the reason I invited you. Maybe Deaton can still pull off the trick. It’s worth asking. Please ask him.

I still think about those other, better versions of us. God damn them.

I loved you, Derek. But I failed.

Take care,

Stiles.

~-~-~

The moon shone like a headlight leading the way home. Always leading, like a mathematical limit, an approach that could never reach its destination.

Lydia began the toasts: “To cheap supermarket beer!”

“To even cheaper supermarket whiskey!” Scott continued, earning howls of appreciation from the other wolves.

Stiles blurted out, “To freedom!” He looked down at his shoulder in embarrassment, wisps of smoke and ember from the fire framing the shadows of Derek’s face. His smile was subtle but altogether present, with the kind of patient affection that Stiles never knew he had been missing all these years. Hearing the others snickering around him, the accusations of corniness and sentimentality, he killed the last of his beer and finished sheepishly, “or whatever.”


	13. Something Like Mercy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek tries to decide what to do now that Stiles has gone through with the spell.

Stiles and the Sheriff ride silently back to the house, Stiles smiling nervously over at the driver’s seat, John arranging his face in what he hopes resembles a smile even though he knows his eyes are unconvincing.

Stiles taps his fingers against his left knee, the quick jolts against his unfamiliar body keeping him present, making him real. He turns abruptly. “Am I in trouble?”

The Sheriff chuckles, puts his hand on Stiles’, squeezing it against his knee. “No. You’re fine,” he says, a minor twitch at the corners of his mouth giving way to his usual concerned flatness. “Everybody’s gonna be fine.”

~-~-~

Derek sighs, slumps away from the door. He leans against the end table, the thumbish lump of wax still sitting there, inert. He grips it. It throbs with warmth and its form leans into the pressure from his fingers, like the soul. It slaps against the far wall wetly and slides toward the floor as if embarrassed at its failure, also like the soul.

He finds himself on his knees by the wall, scraping at the candle’s fickle little trail with a single claw. He sighs, pulls up his knees, crouches in the corner. An adjacent bookshelf catches his attention, briefly. He thinks he sees a familiar name, but it’s a trick of the light.

The loss hangs low in his stomach like a rich meal, an uneasy creature grumbling: _I will make you strong one day, but not yet._

~-~-~

The house is quiet as Stiles enters, closes his eyes, breathes deep. The living room smells unfamiliar, like cooking. Even the quiet of the house is unfamiliar. He begins to open his eyes, expecting to see some place other than the house in which he grew up. He thinks lazily, _this isn’t where it used to be_ , and feels a pair of arms around his waist.

He finishes opening his eyes, blinking away the stale residue of sleep, made gummy by the beginnings of tears. He looks down and Melissa is there, arms crossing his back as she smiles and leans against his chest. “It’s so good to have you back.”

In the weary, quiet strangeness of home, he can feel her jaw tremble against the hollow of his heart.

~-~-~

Derek arranges his body unsteadily on the couch. His legs, stretched out and open, his limbs enclosing a kind of untethered wanting. In this freedom without an anchor, he remembers.

~-~-~

The seminar room was small and austere, with a kind of open silence that could only come within the confines of a well-controlled seminar. Professor Duffy was explaining Weil on the divine, her eyes sparkling as she read from _Gravity and Grace_ : “Nothing which exists is worthy of love. We must therefore love that which does not exist.”

The words plucked the cords inside his chest, and he closed his eyes, his fingers scratching across the open surface of the pages in front of him.

“Anything to add, Mr. Hale?” Professor Duffy looked at him expectantly, her small frame leaning forward. She was nervously arranging the grey curls atop her head as she curled one leg underneath her body. She shrugged slightly, still smiling. “How about Weil’s thoughts on faith? How does she define faith in this piece, Mr. Hale?”

Derek remembered the quiet of The Preserve, how the snow had been made to hang in the quiet of the moon. How, in retrospect, “you love me” had come to constitute a threat in the intervening years. He thought about loving that which does not exist, and, an image of Stiles silhouetted by sparks leapt to mind, he wondered if that might extend to something that had been lost.

He breathed deeply, the stale air in the classroom curling through his nostrils. “I think that Weil thinks that faith is love without hope.”

Professor Duffy blinked, smiling weakly. Her reply was even weaker. “That depends on how you define hope, Mr. Hale.”

~-~-~

Lydia slips through the doorway mostly unnoticed. “Everything we’ve been through, and you’re gonna let a little world-altering magic get you down?” She leans against the door, crossing her ankles smugly.

Derek smiles grimly. “Now that’s the trademark Lydia Martin grace we all know and love.” He sets his pen and paper down in his lap. “Can I help you?”

“I prefer to call it mercy,” she says, crossing the room and nudging his feet off the couch. She sits down, glancing at the pad in his lap. “‘Most people call you loud and boisterous, but I remember you for your quiet,’” she reads aloud, quirking an eyebrow. He flips the pad over and she frowns. “Writing a letter to Mr. Stilinski, are we? You Hale boys and your letters…”

“I fail to see how that’s any business of yours,” he says, tentatively turning the paper over in his hands and scratching out the lines at the top of the page.

Lydia levels him with a look. “Derek, I’m two time zones away from where I live because of you.” She runs a fingertip along the edge of a long red nail. “All of it’s my business.” She stands up, patting his leg. “Now come on. You’re needed at the Stilinski house.”

Derek starts to get up even before he can blink, asking, “Needed? Says who?”

~-~-~

Derek steps through the front door tentatively, and the house feels like a siege.

John crosses the living room and extends a hand. Derek grips it tightly, and John pulls him into a courteous cross-shouldered hug. “Melissa wants to talk to you,” he whispers into Derek’s ear. “Make sure I’m there when she does.”

Derek nods and pulls back. Lydia pats his shoulder and slides past him to hug Allison, who looks at Derek blankly, as if he were a ghost.

The pack is assembled in the living room, a handful of ostentatiously-unrelated conversations taking place as obvious cover. “Hey, everybody,” Melissa starts, “Derek’s here.” The pack feigns surprise, breaking up the non-conversations all around the periphery with a chorus of _ohh_ and _wow, Derek_.

Derek rolls his eyes and scans the room. He turns to Melissa and asks, “Where’s Stiles?” She puts her hand on his shoulder and leads him to the couch. She sits down to Derek’s left and to his right Scott fiddles with his phone. Derek sees the words appear on the screen: “yeah, he just got here.”

He sighs. “Is somebody gonna tell me what I’m doing here?”

Allison speaks up. “Derek, we wanted you to come here because we want you to know that we’re all okay.” He looks at her, puzzled. “You don’t have to worry.”

“I don’t think I follow,” he says, shifting nervously.

Allison looks around for someone else to explain. “Thanks, guys,” she says, shifting the sleeping child on her hip. “We’re all okay _without you_ , Derek. It’s been a long time since we’ve all been together, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to…”

“We know how hard it is for you to be here,” Isaac speaks up, shrinking into himself after he’s said it. Lydia glares at him and he crosses his hands, shrugging.

Derek stands up, straightening his jacket. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“You know where the bathroom is, son,” John says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder toward the stairs.

Derek flinches at the word “son,” and stalks out of the room. “I know, I just wanted to leave.”

~-~-~

Derek rinses his hands and splashes water on his face as he stares into the mirror. When he dries his face with the towel hanging from the rack he sifts through the smells, latching onto the one he recognizes, the citrus musk that can only be Stiles. _He’s been here._ He slaps off the light, rushing down the hall to Stiles’ room. Later, when he tells himself the story, he will almost believe he was following the smell.

He bursts through the door, incredulous, eyes scanning the darkness.

The room is empty. Derek steps forward into the room and it feels only marginally less empty.

~-~-~

Stiles drums his index and middle fingers against his knee, listening as Deaton calmly demonstrates a simple spell.

“So,” Stiles says, cutting Deaton off, “you’re saying that I used to have… magical powers,” he says, stifling a laugh and waggling his fingers, “but I lost them for… some unspecified reason… and now you want to try to help me get them back?”

“I’m saying you _have_ to get them back, Stiles.” Deaton closes his fingers over Stiles’ phone, which has materialized in his hand against Stiles’ objections. “Focus.” The phone buzzes in Deaton’s hand, and he silences it, setting it on his desk.

“Can I have my phone back? I’m not even really using it. I just wanna… well, Scott’s supposed to keep me updated about this… well, about this guy I met. I mean, I don’t really even know how I know him, but I woke up next to him this morning. As in… _woke up next to him this morning_ , and I don’t even really know if I like him or not, I just want to kinda see where it goes, and so I kinda need updates to be able to do that, you know? I mean, I don’t think I’m crushing or anything—I learned my lesson after Lydia—but, I don’t know. I guess I think I like him. But anyway, I just mean that I would like my phone back, and I promise it won’t be a distraction. Please?” Deaton stares at him blankly. “ _Pretty_ please?” Stiles’ face drops. “You’re no fun.”

“Stiles? Please be quiet.”

~-~-~

Melissa knocks lightly on the door. She steps into the darkness as Derek turns. She speaks smoothly, as if pouring water:

“I need to say something and it’s going to be unpleasant for you. I feel like I should apologize for that in advance.” She closes her hands like a book in her lap. “You’re not a parent, so I don’t think you can understand, but… I will do whatever I need to do to protect Scott and Stiles. I will _always_ do whatever I need to do to protect Stiles.” She smiles sympathetically, then her face drops into a grimace. “John and I discussed it, and we need you to leave. Go to Chicago, go to New York, go wherever. I know Peter knows people in Europe. You can go there. That might be better. It’s certainly farther.” Her face betrays no emotion, nothing bends the steel that is Melissa McCall. “But Derek,” she says, leaning forward and glaring mightily, “if you make any attempt to contact Stiles, there will not be a safe place for you in the world.” She leans back, a bitter grin crossing her exhausted face. “Don’t test me on that. My grandchildren are Argents, after all.”

Derek swallows, his throat bobbing heavily. “C-can I say… goodbye?”

Melissa smiles sweetly and takes his hand. She squeezes it. “No. No, you can’t. He’ll remember you fondly. He’ll mention what he thinks he remembers of your one night together.” Her eyes glaze over, and she laughs mirthlessly. “He’ll idly wonder what you’re doing or where you, but he will never know. He can’t.” Melissa looks away, mouth ajar. She brings a flattened hand to her mouth and turns back to Derek. “I won’t let him.”

“Could you…” He heaves a breath, as if his body is pretending a shyness when it just isn’t capable. “Could you give him a message for me? Tell him everything I ever did was to protect him?”

Melissa stands and places her hand on Derek’s shoulder. He leans into her touch, fingers gripping the hem of her sweater, his arms defeatedly wrapping around her arm, his whole body shaking. She smiles down at him, full of pity, then pulls her arm free indelicately.

She makes it halfway to the door before saying no. She stops in the doorway, turning, the hallway’s long shadows creasing her face. “We’ve only just gotten him back, Derek.”

Lydia appears in the doorway as Melissa brushes past. When she sees Derek’s face, she lets out a small sound, like an animal being strangled. “Derek,” she says, swallowing hard and nodding, blinking tears from her eyes as she glares at Melissa in mid-retreat, “Deaton called. We have to go.”

~-~-~

Lydia parks outside Deaton’s place with a screech, huffing furiously at Derek. “You’re going to ask him to do _what_?! Derek, this is monu _mentally_ stupid, this is pro _foundly_ stupid, this is… well, this is the stupidest fucking idea you’ve ever had, is what it is!”

Derek fidgets with the sunglasses that cover his red eyes and tear-chapped cheeks. “It wasn’t actually my idea. It was Stiles’. He put it in his letter. I think he wants me to be… free, finally, from all of this.” His voice drops to a choked whisper. “Like he is. I think he wants me to put myself together.”

Lydia shakes her head. “Stiles is an idiot and a coward. You’re better than that. You’re Derek fucking Hale!”

“Well maybe I’m tired of being Derek Hale!” Derek spits out. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—I just… I think he meant it as a kind of mercy, is all? Or something like mercy,” he says, turning to face her and seeing the flash of baby blue behind her in the parking lot.

He’s out of the car before he realizes what he’s seen, what it means: that Deaton had led them right to Stiles.

He bursts through the doors, the twinkling chime echoing through the darkened office. Deaton appears first in the doorway, followed by Stiles, who holds his phone overhead triumphantly. He reads from the screen: “‘Derek headed to Deaton’s, just so you know.’ Derek? _My_ Derek?” His face lights up in glee.

“Hi, Stiles,” Derek says, jaw trembling, eyes watering as he stares at him.

“Oh hi, Derek,” Stiles says, returning his gaze to the phone. “Oh man, I didn’t think I’d get to see him again,” he says to no one in particular.

Lydia and Deaton exchange a look. “Stiles?” Deaton offers.

Stiles looks up, sees Derek standing in the doorway with Lydia over his shoulder. He starts, tossing his phone into the air and catching it once, twice, three times before somehow ending up on the floor. Derek steps over cautiously, extending his hand. Stiles takes it, chuckling nervously. “So, uh, how much of that did you hear?”

“Enough,” Derek says, pulling Stiles to his feet. As he stands, he leans forward and kisses Derek on the lips, grinning into the firm line of his mouth. Derek pulls away, dropping Stiles’ hand and sputtering.

Stiles lifts his hands defensively, scoffing. “Damn, dude,” he says, pushing past him to stand next to Lydia. “Somebody must’ve fucked you up bad.”

Stiles and Lydia both flinch as Derek lets out a booming laugh, his chest wracked with the sound. He doesn’t turn around to face the two of them staring at him. He just laughs, the sound climbing from his belly toward his throat as he tries to catch his breath, fails to, and chokes out a harsh sob. He half-turns to the door, the light from Deaton’s office silhouetting his tear-soaked face as he lets out a hoarse whisper: “Yeah, you could say that.”


End file.
